A persuasive and authoritative call for action with an engaging personal touch.
Film star Cheadle and human-rights activist Prendergast pool their talents in an earnest attempt to arouse public concern over the genocide in Darfur and channel that concern into productive action.
The authors speak in separate voices about the personal journeys that brought them to this task. Cheadle is more formal and reserved as he describes his work on Hotel Rwanda and how that film led him to the struggle against genocide in Darfur. Prendergast writes with breezy assurance as he traces his activism back to a 1983 trip to Mali that revealed to him “the unfairness of the relationship between Africa and the rest of the world.” Their voices are joined, however, in the book’s main narrative, which shows what is happening in Darfur and seeks to create a popular constituency that will bring pressure on the U.S. government to take action. They sketch the historical background of Darfur’s present crisis: competition for land and access to water, the Sudanese government’s manipulation of local tensions for political gain. They present a graphic picture of the atrocities taking place there and the devastating effects of the well-organized Janjaweed raids on non-Arab villages. Examining previous efforts on behalf of victims of human-rights violations, they conclude that pressure from citizen groups is the most effective way to shame governments into action. To this end, they call on readers to take six steps: raise awareness, raise funds, write a letter, call for divestment, join an organization and lobby the government. They provide specific examples of how each of these strategies has worked in other situations. An appendix and boxed inserts throughout the text summarize courses of action, offer concrete advice and direct readers to additional sources of information, making this work a virtual handbook for aspiring activists.
A persuasive and authoritative call for action with an engaging personal touch.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-4013-0335-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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