A moving collection of writings that bring to life the personal tragedies behind the familiar image of refugees fleeing along the roads of Bosnia, their belongings held in a single suitcase or plastic bag. Poems, stories, and other narratives by men, women, and children who have been driven from their homes in Bosnia and Croatia have been gathered together in an attempt to communicate the raw reality of life as a refugee, ``the bad dream,'' as one says, ``that won't go away.'' Many entries are first-time efforts to put powerful emotions into words. Aside from relating the specifics of the horrendous ordeals these people have suffered, the writings forcefully convey the character and texture of these emotions. For instance, we hear repeatedly how songs from their homeland flood the refugees with memories of cafes and friends. Indeed, many speak of their homeland with the warmth and feeling usually reserved for individuals; Bosnia and various towns are mourned and glorified. The Suitcase lays special emphasis on the plight of women refugees, many of whom have been raped, almost all of whom have lost family. The majority of the pieces here are by women; several essays contributed by human rights activists set the experience of these refugees, many of whom are Muslims, within the larger contexts of Muslim women refugees elsewhere and the overall international refugee situation. One of the strongest and most haunting pieces is by the novelist and essayist Dubravka Ugresic, who addresses not women's issues per se but the universal feelings of exile. Summing up the agony shared by the often less eloquent refugees, Ugresic poignantly comments on the singular agony of civil war (enemies speaking the same language): ``And now I think I know that language is our punishment, a pledge of remembering and forgetting at the same time, a pledge of our eternal, painful, and exhausting relationship.'' (23 b&w photos, 1 map, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-520-20458-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1996
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
PERSPECTIVES
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