An effective call to action, though providing no cures. (4-page photo insert)
A young American doctor puts his healing skills to use in the slums of Port-au-Prince–and calls to the outside world for assistance.
Dr. Bentivegna's patients would arrive at Sans Fil, the "Home for the Dying," abandoned by their families, who were unable to care for them. Mothers left their babies at the Children's Home, knowing that they would at least be well-fed. Amid the ulcers, abscesses, and infections, the primary malady afflicting all of Bentivegna's patients is poverty. As the doctor explains in his brief history of Haiti, deep economic and social stratification, and rampant institutional corruption, allow an elite minority to retain its privileges while the vast majority struggle to survive. Though nothing here will surprise those familiar with the country, this is a valuable primer for caution and humility on the part of anyone undertaking humanitarian aid. Constantly aware of his own limitations, Bentivegna is frank in his claim that piecemeal efforts by well-meaning outsiders often accomplish little, ultimately thwarted by corruption or unintended consequences. Specifically, food donations may prevent some from starving, but they also suppress the local economy because no farmer or merchant can compete with free handouts. Bentivegna avoids the arrogant paternalism of many doctors; he even adopts a Creole practice for consoling a grieved mother, and supplements his own words with Creole proverbs. Despite his intention, however, he presents the narrative from a slightly off-putting professional arm's length, not allowing the perspectives of others–not including his mother, whose essay on her visit to Haiti is appended. Though published in 1991, the book is far from obsolete (with the exception of an out-of-date chapter on AIDS); the misery that so many Haitians endure has not improved. In a new author's note, Bentivegna observes that more doctors will not solve Haiti's problems, but his political prescription betrays a naïve hope that the US government's agenda toward Haiti would ever be as sincere as his own.
An effective call to action, though providing no cures. (4-page photo insert)Pub Date: April 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-962-60010-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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