Well-informed, but more of a fervent screed than a well-rounded study.
A dense chronicle of indigenous struggle in Mexico from journalist Gibler.
The author begins by noting that the Spanish conquest did not eliminate the original inhabitants, but rather subdued them. Although 90 percent of the indigenous population in Mexico perished from “violence, disease and forced labor,” 62 distinct groups survived. These groups now make up 13 percent of the total population and “continue to be the most marginalized, vulnerable, and poor sector.” The divisions among social classes in Mexico are pronounced, stemming from many barriers established from the time of Spanish rule, such as the injunction against the owning of property by indigenous groups. Today, the disenfranchisement of the poor remains embedded, as evidenced in the “gulf” Gibler carefully delineates between the wealthiest and most destitute citizens, exacerbated by recent milestones such as Carlos Salinas’s disastrous privatization schemes and signing of NAFTA. The author looks at the role of the United States in terms of its continued “economic imperialism,” which includes the displacement of people from Mexican industries and agriculture through migration, and collusion in the lucrative system of drug violence and corruption. Gibler then studies various indigenous uprisings that have sought to reclaim autonomy: in Oaxaca, where teachers took the lead in organizing demonstrations of civil disobedience in 2006; in Chiapas, where a ragtag army of indigenous insurgents called the Zapatista Army of National Liberation rebelled in 1994; and in the creation of the principality San Juan Copala in the Triqui region of Oaxaca in response to the pressure to strip the Triquis of their land. Gibler employs a murky mixture of history, personal tales of resistance, academic quotes and ardent persuasion in his rallying cry for a “radical equality of inclusion.”
Well-informed, but more of a fervent screed than a well-rounded study.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-87286-493-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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