Scores more hits than misses as an interfaith dialogue seeking not converts but understanding.
Qazwini, head of the oldest and largest Shi’a mosque in the United States, seeks to bridge misunderstandings between Americans and Muslims through his life story and interpretations of various Islamic worldviews.
The author avers that acts by extremists, the media’s thirst for spectacle and historical geopolitical opportunism have given Americans a dangerously skewed notion of the everyday Muslim man and woman, giving rise to suspicions of Islam’s compatibility with democracy and civil rights. To convey the experience of being a devout Muslim today, Qazwini offers his own journey as testament. Though his life is not exactly representational—son of a respected imam, his family suffered intense persecution under Saddam Hussein and more than once had to flee in the night from the jackboot at the door—it is apt in showing how Muslims, often on the move, must redraw their cultural boundaries with each shift. This is so even within Muslim communities, where contending schools have specific requirements and ingrained prejudices. These personal experiences have an engaging immediacy that allows readers to see the world through a practicing Muslim perspective, where culture and religion are held fast. His parallel story of Islam’s evolution says some canny things about the manipulation of faith to serve vested power, but the strokes are too broad to leave an indelible impression. “Our women wear hijab [conservative clothing] willingly and proudly” is the kind of blanket statement that undercuts his authority. But Qazwini makes a solid case that Islamic institutions can embrace democracy as easily as those of Judaism and Christianity, that most Muslim immigrants appreciate the United States as the best of both worlds and that Muslim participation in the American political mainstream will hasten cross-cultural awareness.
Scores more hits than misses as an interfaith dialogue seeking not converts but understanding.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6454-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
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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