A slender but important contribution to a discourse that needs more champions.
A humane call for peace in the Middle East by the widow of the assassinated Egyptian president.
Anwar Sadat was murdered on October 6, 1981, by what Jehan Sadat (A Woman of Egypt, 1987) calls “Islamic fanatics who believed that the peace he forged with Israel would perish along with him.” They had reason for that belief, since peace has proved elusive—though, the author argues, the 1979 Egypt-Israeli treaty has held. Sadat, who divides her time between Washington, D.C., and Cairo, traces much of the impetus for Islamic fundamentalism to the 1967 war, a humiliating experience for the Arab nations arrayed against Israel—but, in the eyes of some, a sign of God’s disfavor that required a “return to the faith as it was practiced in the Prophet’s day.” The Egyptian victory over Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War did nothing to turn the tide of fundamentalism, especially after Anwar Sadat, by his widow’s account, took the occasion to relax tensions and seek an avenue to peaceful coexistence. The fundamentalist war has now widened to include the Western powers, which, notes the author, affords another occasion—for the Islamic faithful to repudiate the extremism of Osama bin Laden and company and “safeguard the ideals that Islam enjoins: compassion, social justice, and tolerance.” In turn, the West must “look beyond the lunatic fringe” by, among other things, rejecting the notion of the “clash of civilizations.” That flawed theory, she argues, presupposes that Islam is monolithic, stagnant and incapable of change. Sadat’s sentiments are wise and welcome, though she recognizes that there are many obstacles toward Western-Islamic and Israeli-Palestinian accommodation, not least of them the status of Jerusalem, which, she writes, must be made “safe and open to all believers.” Sadat argues that people throughout the Middle East want peace; only politicians and puritans do not.
A slender but important contribution to a discourse that needs more champions.Pub Date: March 24, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9219-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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