A coherent overview for scholars of the region.
The Taliban are gone now, but will they be back? To judge by this scholarly account of Afghan politics, the chances are good that the answer is yes.
State-building in Afghanistan, Dorronsoro (Political Science/Sorbonne) suggests, is akin to stacking mercury with a pitchfork. So it has been from the first, when, in 1929, the constitutional monarchy of Afghanistan was carved out of bits of the former Persian Empire. Soon rivalries of various kinds—personal, ethnic, regional, religious and political—began to pull the country apart. The Communists came to power in the 1970s in part because the educated urban elite had abandoned some of those rivalries in favor of an ideology that put party solidarity ahead of other kinds of loyalties. But, Dorronsoro argues, the Communist Party failed to build a base outside the cities where that educated elite lived: “Radio stations throughout the country spread the new regime’s propaganda,” Dorronsoro writes, “but the unfamiliar Marxist-Leninist language fell harshly on the people’s ears.” At the same time, Islamic students began to reject the teachings of the traditional mullahs and, when civil war came, to radicalize a countryside already inclined to despise city dwellers. That war against the Marxist regime and its Soviet benefactors had many causes, Dorronsoro writes, though it was widely interpreted as mainly an ethnic conflict, “since this was the only language which the foreign powers understood without difficulty.” Following the Soviet defeat and the overthrow of the Marxists, the old rivalries began to emerge; a decade later, they would be complicated by a split between those who favored Iraq over those who favored Saudi Arabia. Enter the short-term winner in that argument, the Taliban, which “gave expression to the desire of rural people to avenge themselves on the towns” even as they alienated the nation’s minorities, yielding an unintended “ethnicization” of the conflict. The minority population is in charge now, backed by an American occupying force. But, Dorronsoro suggests, the time will come when the countryside, resistant to the more liberal cities, will rise again.
A coherent overview for scholars of the region.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-231-13626-9
Page Count: 385
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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