A timely, important topic, but this weakly supported polemic fails to adequately explain the many pressing problems in...
Debut author Sein, a Muslim, accuses his fellow Muslims worldwide of corruption, intolerance and cruelty.
“Deeply shaken” by 9/11, Sein, a well-traveled engineer from Pakistan, takes a “critical look” at the Muslim psyche, and from his perspective, the view isn’t pretty. Among the problems in the Muslim world: brutality, corruption, human rights abuses, intolerance and a sense of victimhood. The book traces these supposed universal attributes of Muslims to two main sources: a high self-regard as “God’s pampered followers” and envy of Westerners, “better and smarter than us.” Giving ample evidence of corruption in Muslim countries, ranging from small bribes for cops and petty bureaucrats to rigged elections at government’s highest levels, Sein wonders why suicide bombers don’t target corrupt Muslim officials. Written as short essays in a kind of journal format dating back to 2005, most of Sein’s points develop either anecdotally, based on conversations with friends and acquaintances, or as commentary upon what’s by now become old news. In addition, the anecdotal evidence isn’t well-supported. For instance, the author attributes to “many an elderly person” his claim that Muslim freedom has declined since the end of British rule in Pakistan; off-the-cuff asides—“I don’t know how true this is”; “if I remember correctly”; and “I cannot say with certainty”—won’t inspire confidence. Though Sein shows courage in even attempting this healthy act of self-criticism, especially of a religion whose fundamentalist followers are notoriously intolerant, he paints with too broad a brush. And even if he limited his criticism to fundamentalist factions, it could easily apply to many other religious and nationalist zealots. In fact, he shows a stunning naïveté regarding the reasons for the United States’ foreign adventures, though he does at least concede its failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and other Muslim nations—though he blames the victims by pinning the continuing turmoil on the invaded rather than the invaders. Like many such works, the book’s long on critique but short on solutions, offering only vague, mysterious nostrums, such as encouraging freedom and opportunity in Muslim countries “through silent and invisible means.”
A timely, important topic, but this weakly supported polemic fails to adequately explain the many pressing problems in Muslim countries or to offer any likely solutions.Pub Date: March 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456700911
Page Count: 252
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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