A useful update to Elizabeth Neuffer’s The Key to My Neighbor’s House (2001), Gérard Prunier’s The Rwanda Crisis (1995),...
More than 800,000 dead in the space of months: the pen can be mightier than the sword indeed. And, as the critic F.L. Lucas observed, “though the tongue has no bones, it can break millions of them.”
The butchery in Rwanda ten years ago stunned the world—once the world got around to paying any attention to it, that is. But, writes Temple-Raston (A Death in Texas, 2002), anyone who had an ear to the ground there would have heard portentous murmurings long before: Hutus, the ethnic majority, were thirsting for revenge against the lighter-skinned, taller Tutsi minority, once the favorites of the colonial powers and now on their own. Whipping these murmurings into murder was the work of many leading citizens, among them a bilious history professor named Ferdinand Nahimana, who “found himself able to find the right words to reach the eager ears of ordinary Rwandans, men and women who were more characterized by action than reflection.” Nahimana, who with fellow political entrepreneur Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza launched the immensely popular Radio-Télévision des Mille-Collines, found words to make Goebbels jealous, castigating the Tutsi as “cockroaches” who merited only being squashed underfoot. Lesser media types such as Hassan Ngeze, a tabloid publisher who bragged that he had exclusive lines on the truth and certain knowledge of Tutsi plans to bedevil their Hutu neighbors, added to the din. None of these men lifted a machete or a gun, but, as Temple-Raston shows with admirable clarity, they killed hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens all the same and richly deserved the crimes-against-humanity tribunals that eventually found them. That process of justice, Temple-Raston writes in closing, is an important aspect of the healing that is now working its way through Rwanda a decade later—even though, one Hutu warns, “There will be another genocide.”
A useful update to Elizabeth Neuffer’s The Key to My Neighbor’s House (2001), Gérard Prunier’s The Rwanda Crisis (1995), Samantha Power’s “A Problem from Hell”(2002), and other studies of slaughter.Pub Date: March 9, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-5110-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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