An important, deeply felt look at lives in constant peril.
A powerful collection of stories from refugees stuck in asylum limbo in Greece.
The early 21st century has seen a rise in authoritarianism and anti-immigration sentiment, both of which have emerged alongside—or perhaps in response to—explosive levels of poverty, armed conflict, and climate change. In this book, journalism professor Benedict and Syrian writer Awwadawnan humanize the plight of the 84 million people “forcibly displaced” as a result of these issues by presenting the narratives of asylum seekers from Syria, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Cameroon. After difficult, often terrifying journeys, these men and women landed in Greece, the "major gateway to Europe” for people fleeing social, political, and/or economic oppression. Yet because of a 2016 agreement between the European Union and an immigrant-inundated Turkey, Greek refugee camps have become like prisons. Asmahan, a woman fleeing the Syrian civil war, observes that individuals, and sometimes entire families, are forced to live in shipping containers for months on end while awaiting word on their asylum status. Even when she arrived at a slightly more accommodating camp, Asmahan notes that “we were still prisoners, and we were still forced to feel that we were nothing but creatures made to eat, sleep and submit.” Woman and girls are especially vulnerable to the violence that plagues these camps; assaults and rapes are rarely reported due to fear of retaliation. Even when refugees are granted permits to travel around Greece, their lives are still filled with tremendous struggle. Hasan, another Syrian, recounts his own difficulties with poor housing, poverty, ill health, and hostility from Greeks, even those who ran the local hospital in the town where he lived. Gut-wrenching and necessary, this book sharply depicts an escalating humanitarian crisis that shows few signs of slowing down. In the epilogue, the authors provide updates on their subjects.
An important, deeply felt look at lives in constant peril.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-80444-001-8
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Footnote Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
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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