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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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