An alarming and important indictment of Obama’s ineffectual approach to one of his signature campaign issues and of...
As Barack Obama’s presidency comes to a close, lawyers who defend inmates at Guantánamo assess his broken promise to close the prison and the legacy he will leave.
Though the public knows it as a prison for the world’s most hardened terrorists, Guantánamo is and has been home to a great number of people who never had any connection to terrorism. Of the 779 men who have suffered incarceration at the base, fewer than 10 have ever been convicted of anything, and all but one of those convictions occurred in ad hoc military tribunals with arbitrary and unclear rules and standards of evidence. Dozens of the remaining prisoners were cleared for release years ago, remaining only because Yemen, their home country, is considered too dangerous to repatriate them. In this collection, edited by Hafetz (Seton Hall Law School; Habeas Corpus After 9/11, 2011, etc.), members and advocates of the Guantánamo defense bar contribute their personal reflections, many quite moving, on their cases. Sabin Willett asks, “were we always a timorous people, who ran from our Constitution at the first sign of trouble?” Several contributors invoke Kafka, as their clients inhabit an alternate universe where those found not guilty are subjected to double and triple jeopardy, hearsay is considered allowable evidence, and attorney-client communications are intercepted by the National Security Agency. Shayana Kadidal tells the story of his client, a clearly mentally ill man who was apparently imprisoned solely because he told interrogators he had once taken a taxi to Bara, a small suburb of Peshawar that they promptly confused with Tora Bora. Martha Raynor sums up the situation of anyone who finds himself in this netherworld, saying of her client, “when he will be released, who will decide it, and under what criteria is utterly unknown.”
An alarming and important indictment of Obama’s ineffectual approach to one of his signature campaign issues and of America’s tarnished system of justice as a whole.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4798-5280-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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
BOOK REVIEW
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