An eye-opening political exposé of what has been described as the most dangerous country in the world.
Former Chilean ambassador to the United States Muñoz (The Dictator's Shadow: Life Under Augusto Pinochet, 2008 etc.) reports on the investigation into the facts and circumstances of Benazir Bhutto's (1953–2007) assassination.
Now with the U.N. Development Program in Latin America and the Caribbean, the author, along with fellow commissioners, investigated on behalf of Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon after the Pakistani government's 2008 request; the group produced their report in early 2010. In addition to his account of their report, Muñoz assesses modern Pakistan's complex relations with the U.S. The narrative blends elements of a spy story with detective fiction and political thriller. Muñoz chronicles how the U.S. and British governments facilitated the return of Bhutto—scion of a leading Pakistani secularist and democratic political family who “had always wanted to be a diplomat and preferred intellectual debates rather than the corridors or smoke-filled rooms of power politics”—in order to broaden the political base of then-dictator Gen. Pervez Musharraf. The author shows that the government did not deliver on promises to provide security assistance or escorts, even while people outside the country attempted to exert influence on Bhutto’s behalf. She was under attack from the day of her return to Karachi, when her convoy was bombed. After the assassination, authorities blamed Pakistan's Taliban-linked fundamentalists; they also circulated misleading stories about the cause of death, failed to autopsy the body and power-washed the scene of the crime almost immediately. Muñoz points to the double game Pakistan's intelligence service has played with the Taliban and al-Qaida and the mistrust that has prevailed between the U.S. and Pakistan, and he traces the roots of these conflicts back to the Cold War and the origins of Pakistan itself.
An eye-opening political exposé of what has been described as the most dangerous country in the world.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-393-06291-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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
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
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