A rowdy piece of work that makes moral high-mindedness and a bacchanalian approach to life seem a great fit.
Britain’s former ambassador to Uzbekistan unloads his prodigious rage and frustration about his country’s morally compromised part in America’s dirty little war on terror.
If Murray were as awe-inspiring a person as he believes himself to be, it would make for quite an astounding package—if only. The good news for readers of his scabrous political memoir is that he’s a good hand at telling a rollicking story, even if his sizable ego often obstructs the view. Sent to represent Her Majesty’s interests in Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004, Murray (who had spent a fair amount of time as a foreign-service officer in Soviet bloc countries) was quickly repulsed by the barbaric level of human-rights abuses committed by the government. The horrors included everything from suspected dissidents being scalded alive to serial rapes of female civilians by a police force run rampant. Meanwhile, the government appeared to be little more than a cabal of corrupt gangsters who kept Uzbekistan’s people in a state of slave-like deprivation. No matter how many telegrams Murray sent to London informing his superiors of what was happening on the ground, he was invariably given the same answer: Uzbekistan is an important ally in the war on terror, and any abuses are caused by a natural fear of Muslim extremism. Murray is no fish-eyed scold, though. He favors good booze and women and has a gift for cockeyed humor. An uncompromising Scot clearly expert at his job, he’s also given to grade-school-level sexism and supreme self-satisfaction. What sets this book apart from most score-settling tomes by former politicos is that while Murray may be a pompous, conceited windbag, that doesn’t keep him from being absolutely right in his moral convictions.
A rowdy piece of work that makes moral high-mindedness and a bacchanalian approach to life seem a great fit.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4801-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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 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
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