Not likely to win any new converts to America’s cowboys-and-Indians approach to fixing foreign countries’ deep-seated...
Long-winded, superfluously stuffed account of the author’s vain attempts to induce the Afghans to give up their primary cash crop.
From November 2004 to May 2005, Hafvenstein worked as a development coordinator for Chemonics International, a contractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), in the military outpost of Lashkargah near the Helmand River, deep in the heart of opium-growing country. His urgent assignment was to wean the growers from poppy while the Afghan government supposedly pushed for its eradication. The USAID team was charged with creating enough temporary paying jobs to cushion the economic damage to opium farmers. However, the scale of the 2004 harvest was hugely lucrative; the Afghans produced a whopping 87 percent of the world’s illegal opium. The author and his colleagues faced an arduous, dangerous task: to manage the walis (provincial governors) as well as the tribal groups and the remnants of Taliban rebels, while securing the safety of the agency’s personnel. They learned that this area was the site of a previous American reconstruction effort in the 1940s, the damming of the Helmand and Arghandab rivers by American engineering company Morrison-Knudsen, one of the contractors on the Hoover Dam. Hafvenstein’s team insinuated itself into the powerful Afghan government agency controlling the rivers’ modern irrigation system in order to secure local jobs clearing drainage ditches. They were threatened by warlords still tied to the Taliban and ultimately defeated by the government’s halfhearted commitment to eradication. Kidnapping and murders forced out the American agency, overwhelmed by the scale and significance of the project.
Not likely to win any new converts to America’s cowboys-and-Indians approach to fixing foreign countries’ deep-seated problems.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59921-131-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
