A lively, if rarely cheerful, travelogue that fills a yawning knowledge gap for readers concerned with international affairs.
A colorful, often bizarre, sometimes grim journey through five Central Asian nations that emerged from the breakup of the Soviet Union.
“Although the five countries are in many ways very different,” writes Norwegian journalist Fatland in her first book in English, “they share the same origin and fate: for almost seventy years, from 1922 to 1991, they were part of the Soviet Union, a gigantic social experiment without parallel in history.” Conquered by czarist Russia in the 19th century, this area was a vast territory with an ancient history and a tribal, largely nomadic, livestock-based economy. This culture mostly disappeared after the 1918 revolution when Stalin and his successors introduced modern technology but little prosperity and no personal freedom. Local strongmen enjoyed a good deal of independence from Moscow and took over as dictators when its influence vanished. Taking a page from Paul Theroux, Fatland delivers a capsule history of each place and then chronicles her travels across immense distances, often in the company of chatty provincials, rarely concealing her low opinions of local lodging, food, hygiene, infrastructure, politics, and architecture. It may not be exotic, but it’s unquestionably eye-opening. Mostly desert but rich in oil, Turkmenistan is a bizarre, Orwellian despotism not unlike North Korea’s, with a similarly wacky autocrat surrounded by an apparently worshipful citizenry. Immense Kazakhstan, the world’s ninth largest nation, is the strongest economy of the five, rich in oil and gas. As befits its size and wealth, its dictator lacks the worst eccentricities of his four colleagues, but his hand is equally iron. Tajikistan is a dirt-poor, corrupt dictatorship; corruption is perhaps all five nations’ leading legacy from the Soviet Union. Uzbekistan, an oppressive police state, does not break the mold. Kyrgyzstan, also poor and corrupt, is a quasi-parliamentary democracy, although not notably stable or free.
A lively, if rarely cheerful, travelogue that fills a yawning knowledge gap for readers concerned with international affairs.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64313-326-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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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