An account that will likely satisfy those with republican sympathies. A truly objective take on the Troubles and the...
A partial, partisan view of the process by which Northern Ireland’s warring factions were brought to conference in the mid-1990s, a process that yielded the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
Adams, the longtime leader of the republican Sinn Féin party, was a key player in those negotiations—and, he is understandably reluctant to say, in the sectarian violence that made those peace talks so desirable. His memoir, certainly of interest to all who have followed the tortuous, bloody course of Northern Irish politics since the 1960s, offers numerous villains for consideration: radical unionists, who favored keeping Northern Ireland a part of the UK; the Royal Ulster Constabulary, given to spraying Catholic neighborhoods with machine-gun fire; and especially the British government, and even more especially the administration of Margaret Thatcher. (“When ten men died in the H-Blocks” following hunger strikes in the early 1980s, Adams insists in a typical turn of rhetoric, “Margaret Thatcher and her regime were seen to be the criminals.”) These three forces, Adams writes, were responsible for introducing an early campaign of “ethnic cleansing” in Northern Ireland by forcing the relocation of hundreds of Catholic families in 1969, which quickened the pace of violence and retaliation; all three behaved badly since, reluctant to give up the gun and truncheon. On the other side, the Irish Republican Army (of which Sinn Féin is the legal, political wing) committed its share of atrocities, too, and while Adams doesn’t much like to talk about such things, he does admit IRA responsibility for the Enniskillen bombing of 1987, when 11 civilians died: “My response,” Adams writes, “was that what the IRA did was wrong. The people who had gathered there were victims of an IRA action which should not have happened.” Finally weary of the bloodshed, the warring parties agreed to negotiations in the mid-1990s, a process moved forward by intervention from a farther shore indeed—namely, Irish-American politicians and Bill Clinton, who took a strong interest in brokering a peace that has yet to be fully realized.
An account that will likely satisfy those with republican sympathies. A truly objective take on the Troubles and the peacemaking process will probably have to be written by a Martian.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50815-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
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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