A mixed bag, but, at its strongest moments, a modern rejoinder to I.F. Stone’s In a Time of Torment.
“The world is sick. It cannot be cured with America’s new war.” So writes Nation magazine commentator Schell (The Unconquerable World, 2003, etc.) in this selection of his post–9/11 columns.
Schell sounds several themes that were once lonely cries in a time of jingoist bluster: military escalation and action against the Muslim world is ill-advised; war is not the answer; the world has ample cause to mistrust and even hate the US; “the bombing should stop, and a new policy—perhaps one of armed humanitarian intervention on the ground—should be adopted”; the rise of terrorism provides yet more reason for nuclear disarmament, before someone gets hurt. Such views have become more current in the months since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but at the time Schell was in a distinct minority. Refreshingly, he allows some of his missed or arguable calls to stand in these pages: his view that the American bombing campaign would rally Afghans to the Taliban, for instance, and his apparent acceptance of the notion that Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il had stores of WMDs and were about to use them. But, more to the point, he records the errors of others, observing that the proffered reasons for going to war were wrong and misleading (writing in June 2003, he notes, for instance, “Hans Blix . . . never stated, as the Bush Administration did, that there were weapons of mass destruction but only that there was some evidence that there might be weapons of mass destruction”). Many of those others are fellow media pundits—Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Christopher Hitchens, et al.—and Schell’s critiques are often right on the money. Indeed, they make the best parts here, the sum of which is mostly useful as a record of who said what and as a work of media criticism, a chastisement of those who should have recognized a lie but instead served it.
A mixed bag, but, at its strongest moments, a modern rejoinder to I.F. Stone’s In a Time of Torment.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-56025-600-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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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