An ambitious and insightful work that speaks with a much-needed voice of reasoned impartiality—in a debate whose...
An impressive, if sometimes unwieldy, examination of Egypt’s unique religio-political climate, concentrating upon its ongoing (and, so far, nonviolent) Islamist revolution.
Foreign correspondent Abdo (The Guardian, The Economist) has set an enormous task for herself, employing a combination of journalistic and anthropological techniques to introduce lay readers to such diverse and complex subjects as the religious and political history of Egypt, the relationship between moderate and militant Islamists, the role of the state in the Islamist revival, the nature of freedom under Islamic law, questions of veiling and female circumcision, and the compatibility of Islamic and secular law. Any one of these subjects would yield ample material for a volume twice as long, and, as a result, the author’s comprehensive and admirably impartial text is sometimes reduced to a series of necessarily superficial treatments of very thorny topics. Drawing primarily on dozens of personal accounts from influential sheiks, impassioned students, and persecuted academics, Abdo offers access to a world that few, if any, Westerners ever see. However, it is the very scope and number of these personal interviews that has encumbered her main purpose—that is, to demonstrate the manner in which the Egyptian Islamic revival is a grassroots phenomenon. Chronological clarity and dedicated character development often fall by the wayside, leaving a trail of confusion in their wake. Perhaps most problematic is the author’s failure to provide either a sense of scale (representative examples are not sufficient to determine the percentage of the population that actually supports the idea of an Islamist society) or to seriously address the possibility of coercion within Islamist organizations and in society as a whole.
An ambitious and insightful work that speaks with a much-needed voice of reasoned impartiality—in a debate whose commentators often understand only the language of bigotry and ignorance.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-19-512540-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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