A persuasively argued case for dismantling a destructive policy.
A Canadian First Nations leader makes a case for Indigenous self-government.
As we approach the 150th year since the passage of Canada’s Consolidated Indian Act of 1876, Joseph convincingly contends that the legislative policy “has constrained and controlled the lives of Status Indians for generations.” The author, who inherited a chief’s seat in the Gayaxala clan of the Gwawa’enuxw tribe of the Kwakwaka’wakw nation, begins with a brief history of Canadian-Indigenous relations for those who may be unfamiliar. Although King George III’s Royal Proclamation of 1763 created a framework for self-determination that recognized the area’s Indigenous residents “as nations of people,” the subsequent Indian Act viewed them as “savages, incapable of governing themselves,” while the Canadian government shifted its priorities toward assimilation that amounted to “cultural genocide,” writes Joseph. After providing historical context, the book transitions to its central thesis that the Indian Act “needs to be dismantled.” Pragmatic in his approach, Joseph emphasizes practical steps for undoing the antiquated law and looks to the future for what would ideally replace it. Foremost among his arguments is that self-government can coexist with “Canada’s fiduciary duty to Status Indians”; allocating resources to First Nations communities directly, he says, will align government funding with “community values and ideas” and make healthcare and other programs “more efficient and effective.” Backed by nearly 200 endnotes, this well-researched book effectively balances scholarship with a deep understanding of Indigenous history. The author, a former professor at Royal Roads University, is the author of multiple books on Indigenous policy and is the co-founder and president of Indigenous Corporate Training, an organization focused on improving Indigenous relations in Canada’s public and private sectors. This brief volume’s accessible approach is complemented by a robust set of appendices that include additional reading suggestions and tips on how readers can get involved in the movement to replace the Indian Act on a grassroots level.
A persuasively argued case for dismantling a destructive policy.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781774586273
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Page Two
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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