A thoughtful and informative work that could have benefitted from a more cohesive structure.
A contemporary look at South Africa’s White supremacy in action.
Pulling together more than a dozen stories of South Africans from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds, Fairbanks—a former political writer for the New Republic who has contributed pieces for the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets—paints a sensitive, often engrossing portrait of the nation during and after apartheid. “I sometimes like to tell people recent South African history loosely collapses two hundred and fifty years of American history into about thirty—from our antebellum era into our future,” she writes. While the author focuses on three people—anti-apartheid activist Dipuo, her daughter Malaika, and former army recruit and proud Afrikaans lawyer Christo—the many other narrative strands sometimes trail into tangents, not all of which are relevant. The beginning of the book is somewhat disorienting, as the author does little to ground readers in the overall context. Some of the sections of the text are engaging, while others are dry and detached despite the moving nature of the topic. The most memorable parts of the book involve Dipuo and Malaika, both of whom emerge as incredibly strong, even heroic characters. While the author’s depth of detail into their lives is important when considering the tumultuous atmosphere in which they live, some readers may be startled by the candid discussions of assault and rape. Though these passages are necessary to convey the gravity of the situations, they will likely distress unguarded readers suffering from their own trauma. The scope of the author’s research is impressive, and she is to be commended for taking care to thoroughly and compassionately expose apartheid and the many complex effects that ripple out to everyday people, demonstrating appropriate nuance while allowing no space for the tolerance of oppression. Though the narrative is disjointed in places, readers won’t soon forget Dipuo and Malaika.
A thoughtful and informative work that could have benefitted from a more cohesive structure.Pub Date: July 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-476-72524-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
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
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