A long-winded view of a fascinating game-changer.
A dense biography of Dr. Nafis Sadik, who changed the world for women through her work on population control.
Miller (Creative Writing/San Jose State Univ.; Desert Flower: The Extraordinary Journey of a Desert Nomad, 1998, etc.) researched Sadik for 10 years to give us this biographical view of the former undersecretary-general and executive director of the U.N. Population Fund. The book follows the improbable path of the Pakistani Sadik through partition, medical school, her early work in local population control and her efforts for the U.N. Population Fund, which she directed for 13 years. Sadik’s family “celebrated her femininity, valued her wishes, gave her the same educational opportunities as her brothers, then encouraged her career and independence.” She worked passionately against genital mutilation, obstetric fistula and childhood marriage. Through Sadik’s tenure at the U.N., the organization was “able to bring respectability to the concept of family planning.” She helped set the tone for controlling population growth by empowering women through education and ensuring basic human rights. The apex of Sadik’s career was the U.N.’s 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo. She outmaneuvered even the Vatican to support reproductive choice for women, brokering consensus for a 20-year plan to address world population and development. Miller intersperses each chapter about Sadik with vignettes of women she met while researching this book. These personal stories introduce us to victims of abuse, persecution, genital mutilation, prostitution and gang rape. The author also uses extensive quotes to bolster her story, but these passages lack concision—as do other parts of the book. Ultimately, it’s a thoroughly researched, inspiring story that runs more than 100 pages too long.
A long-winded view of a fascinating game-changer.Pub Date: March 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8032-1104-9
Page Count: 524
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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