A valuable reminder of the value of fighting for peace.
A collection of in-depth interviews with peacemakers of all kinds.
“Peace mediation itself,” writes Jonathan Cohen, executive director of Conciliation Resources, “needs to evolve and demonstrate its contemporary relevance and effectiveness, amid rapid changes in how wars are fought and in the face of destabilised international security.” These modern challenges, and the various organizations dedicated to meeting them, are the focus of this assemblage of interviews with people working for peace in the world’s dozens of conflict zones. A common denominator, as professor Oliver Richmond writes in his foreword, is an approach to peacemaking that transcends “old boundaries of thought and practice” in attempts to “bridge both distant scholarship and the polemics of politics.” In these interviews, serious and probing questions are put to people in peacemaking roles, and their answers speak more directly to those polemics than any standard narrative could convey. Mohammad Latif Fayaz, for example, who is currently director of the Hazara Cultural House in Finland and formerly served as NATO’s Senior Civilian Representative in Afghanistan, talks about the “very hard moment” in 2021 when he learned that the international community intended to withdraw from the country “without considering on-the-ground realities,” thereby undermining decades of peacebuilding work. Sandra Melone, founder and CEO of Zancora Consulting, touches on the subject of peacemaking as it relates to supporting women’s rights. “When a government claims that girls and women have the right to health and education,” she attests, “I would say, show us where the health services and education actually are.” The assemblage of these voices makes for valuable storytelling; these are men and women who have faced what Helen Kezie-Nwoha describes in her introduction as “the growing complexity of achieving negotiated settlements” in an increasingly fragmented and extremist world.
A valuable reminder of the value of fighting for peace.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2025
ISBN: 9781913641429
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Aurora Metro Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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