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
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
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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