A worthy contribution to the literature of both genocide and conflict resolution, bookending Jean Hatzfeld’s The Antelope’s...
“Can you forgive the people who killed your parents?” That is the most searching question in former Rwandan legislator Sebarenzi’s memoir.
As a boy growing up on the shores of Lake Kivu, the author had no conception of Hutu or Tutsi. Only as a teenager in the early 1970s, as a fresh spasm of ethnic violence swept across Rwanda, did he learn those ethnic distinctions and the history of colonial division that underlay them. Oppressed under Belgian rule, when the Tutsi were given preferred positions, the Hutus had attacked their compatriots many times before. It will be news to many Western readers that the genocide that finally settled on the nation in 1994—when Hutus killed some 800,000 Tutsi (and perhaps many more)—had already been experienced several times, albeit on a less comprehensive scale. Sebarenzi fled to Congo in 1974—“If you get an education, you can escape. If we are killed, you will survive,” his father told him—then traveled abroad before returning to Rwanda following the genocide. On the strength of his education, he was elected to Parliament in 1997, then quickly elevated to speaker, only to encounter the chaos and corruption of the federal government, whose every member, it seemed, opposed Sebarenzi’s efforts to impose a system of checks and balances. As the Parliament’s powers grew under his guidance, Sebarenzi was increasingly threatened and was finally forced to flee the country. His account—assisted by freelance writer Mullane—is valuable to readers seeking to understand the mechanics of ethnic violence, but also the difficulty of securing justice following so enormous a crime. As to the answer to that initial question, Sebarenzi answers, “It is the genocide that is unforgivable, not those who perpetrated it.”
A worthy contribution to the literature of both genocide and conflict resolution, bookending Jean Hatzfeld’s The Antelope’s Strategy (2009) and Tracy Kidder’s Strength in What Remains (2009).Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7573-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
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
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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