A trenchant call for justice in the face of “the ferocity suffered by the Palestinian population.”
“A blemish on humanity.”
Albanese, an Italian lawyer who serves as the U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, opens with an address to that body’s representatives, asking plaintively, “Is it possible that after forty-two thousand people have been killed, you cannot empathize with the Palestinians?” That speech is from October 2024, and of course the number is far higher now, but Albanese’s point remains: namely, that “now the task at hand is to stop the genocide and find a way forward.” She writes, peace is “possible,” but only if both sides commit to it. What is more, she notes, that commitment extends to other nations of the world, including President Donald Trump’s U.S., which—having banned Albanese from entry—“has repeatedly intimidated anyone who dares to touch Israel,” no matter what international crimes Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel commits. Albanese enumerates such “atrocious crimes”: the sundering of humanitarian law and the suppression of the rights of sovereign citizens of another state, the imposition of martial law, the seizure of private property for illegal settlements, and the repeated violation of a fundamental U.N. tenet, “that it is forbidden to acquire territory by force.” Assisting Albanese in driving these points home is a chorus of Palestinian voices, most affectingly those of children, one of whom says, with wisdom beyond years, “Being afraid of death doesn’t stop you from dying; it prevents you from living.” Emphasizing that “I am not here to justify any crimes that the Palestinians may have committed against Israeli civilians in the long course of their oppression,” Albanese suggests a different kind of resistance on the part of allies to punish Israel economically by means of divestitures and other instruments, while pursuing humanitarian relief and legal remedies.
A trenchant call for justice in the face of “the ferocity suffered by the Palestinian population.”Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9781635426038
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
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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