An authoritative study by journalist Sterling (Octopus, 1989) of the breathtaking power and influence accumulated by modern organized crime around the world. Sterling traveled intensively and received cooperation at the highest levels in seeking to discover the extraordinary inroads made by organized crime, particularly in the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union. At the start of the 1990s, she notes, the ``myth still prevailed that only Italy and the United States offered a natural habitat for the Mafia, and for indeed all organized crime.'' She quotes highly reliable estimates that the drug traffic alone exceeds half a trillion dollars a year, making it the world's second biggest moneymaker after the arms traffic, in which organized crime is also involved. In June 1990, at the insistence of German Chancellor Kohl, the prime ministers of the European Community set aside two hours to discuss means by which a European Community without boundaries would deal with the issue. These problems have been compounded by the permeability of borders outside the Community. As a Polish Interior spokesman noted, ``in effect, we have no borders.'' But the biggest single new source of crime has been in Russia. The Russian Interior Ministry warned in 1991 that organized crime would soon control 30%40% of the country's GNP. President Yeltsin himself estimated that by the end of 1992 ``nearly two-thirds of Russia's commercial structure had ties to the growing criminal world.'' Russia, with no law permitting access to bank accounts, no mechanism for controlling private banks, no sanctions for money laundering, no inspectors to check the source of foreign capital, no tax audits, and no legal provisions against organized crime is, says Sterling, almost helpless before the onslaught. While some of her material is badly organized and repetitive, and some, as Sterling herself concedes, ``seemingly unbelievable,'' this book represents the most comprehensive insight so far into a menace that has powerful political as well as legal implications.
Pub Date: June 23, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-74997-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
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
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