Retrospectively instructive on the Middle East, but emotionally flat as a personal narrative.
A hostage recalls his three-week ordeal in the Jordanian desert as Western diplomacy struggled with a new kind of terrorism.
In the wake of the cataclysmic attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, many have forgotten the grim drama that took place three decades earlier, when Palestinian guerillas hijacked three commercial airliners on a single September day in 1970. Raab, now a healthcare executive, was then a 17-year-old returning from a summer in Israel, heading home to New Jersey aboard a TWA 707 jet that had departed Frankfurt for New York. Raab relates in detail how his plane, later joined by two other hijacked airliners from different points of origin, was taken over and landed at dusk in the Jordanian desert. The guerillas emptied one plane and blew it up, threatening to do the same to the jets with kidnapped passengers aboard if their nations of origin did not cooperate and induce Israel to release a list of Palestinians detained for prior terrorist acts. This all happened against the background of an armed movement by Palestinians living in Jordan to overthrow the regime of King Hussein in the wake of his joining Egypt and Israel in a cease-fire and peace talks. The successful conclusion of negotiations for the release of all hostages from the hijacked airliners coincided with the Jordanian Army’s ultimate victory (with Israel’s sub rosa assistance) against the guerillas. But it was a grim three weeks for Raab and the nine other American men taken from their plane to a refugee compound in Amman, where they were held by a rogue element among the hijackers who thought their leaders’ negotiating stance was too conciliatory. The author cuts between the diplomatic maneuvers and the hostages sweating it out in captivity.
Retrospectively instructive on the Middle East, but emotionally flat as a personal narrative.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4039-8420-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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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