Nonetheless, a compelling, up-close look at a conflict too often seen only in TV news bites and blaring headlines.
A revealing glimpse of everyday life shaped by pervasive violence, from an American-born wife and mother living in a Tel Aviv suburb.
Motro’s passionate account is most interesting in the details: the daily struggle to cope with the threat of violence, the aversion to public transportation, the ubiquitous security guards positioned outside restaurants and shopping malls, the rush to account for loved ones each time the sirens blare and the smoke rises from a bomb site. Like many Israelis, Motro’s own cardiologist husband barely escaped a terrorist bomb, courtesy of a last-minute appointment change. Her book gives face and voice to many of those who weren’t so lucky. In many cases, those victims of random violence are either Palestinians themselves, or the poor and elderly who must use the public buses and facilities that are common targets. Motro doesn’t hide her aversion to Ariel Sharon’s hawkish policies, particularly his aggressive stance toward populating Jewish settlements in disputed territories. She notes that, contrary to the generally accepted perception, many of Israel’s five million Jews and one million Palestinians live and work peacefully side by side, particularly in cities like Haifa. She introduces “coexistence activists” on both sides, like 21-year-old Karen Assaf, who smuggles Palestinian-made olive oil in from restricted areas to help support Arab businesses, and Sari Nusseibeh, a charismatic Harvard-educated Arab professor who loudly preaches coexistence with Israel. Throughout, Motro makes vivid the toll of the ongoing conflict in terms of human lives lost, the once-bustling resorts now empty of tourists, the numbing daily news reports, the empty classroom seat where a child victim sat only yesterday. The narrative is sometimes rambling and unfocused, hop-scotching from one violent act to the next. And the truce announced in February by Sharon and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas makes one hope that the author’s generally pessimistic tone is out-of-date.
Nonetheless, a compelling, up-close look at a conflict too often seen only in TV news bites and blaring headlines.Pub Date: July 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-59051-159-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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
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
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