A controversial yet solid report that should open eyes to human-rights violations throughout the world, sensitize Americans...
In this exhaustively researched history of the human-rights organization over the past four decades, a leading foreign affairs columnist, sharing his perceptive interviews with government officials, political prisoners, and activists, delves into the dirt of nations as diverse as Chile, Morocco, and the US.
According to Power’s friend Olusegun Obasanjo—who graduated from his status as one of Amnesty International’s most high-profile political prisoners to become president of Nigeria—the organization’s tactic of bombarding offending governments with letters is like “constant drips of water on stone. It seems to make little difference, but over time it does.” Power details Amnesty’s most momentous interventions, including the arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, which warned other war criminals that they could be brought to international justice. He presents horrifying stories of Ugandan children who were abducted by a brutal combat group, the Lord’s Resistance Army, and forced to fight a war. Just as gruesome are tales of Bokassa, Emperor of the Central Republic of Africa, who was charged with cannibalism and the massacres of nearly a hundred children, and finally, when Amnesty pressured the French government, driven into exile. Despite his sympathy for Amnesty, Power reveals one of its biggest mistakes: lobbying for better prison conditions for Baader-Meinhof, a German gang that conducted acts of terrorism from behind bars. He condemns the governments of China and the US—for practicing capital punishment and condoning the dehumanizing conditions of prison systems, emphasizing George W. Bush’s days as governor of Texas, where 214 inmates have been executed since 1982. While China’s government acknowledges its brutalities, the Land of the Free remains hypocritical about its own.
A controversial yet solid report that should open eyes to human-rights violations throughout the world, sensitize Americans to their own country’s wrongdoings, and teach them what can be done on a grassroots level to bring such atrocities to an end.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2001
ISBN: 1-55553-487-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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