A grim filigree of turmoil during peacetime.
Hill, who taught in Eritrea for two years, beginning in 1996, digs deeply, humanely, and with political keenness into the country’s history.
In 1993, after more than thirty years of fighting against their Ethiopian occupiers, 99.81 percent of Eritrean voters cast their ballots in favor of independence. It doesn’t take much of a stretch to imagine why, writes the author: the Ethiopians had been brutally destructive. Hill provides a crisp, colorful history of this strip along the Red Sea, from the ancient kingdom of Axum through the period of Italian colonial rule to the quashing of Eritrea’s post-WWII dreams of independence due to the duplicity of the US government, determined to reward Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie for his anti-communism. The author then chronicles the long-odds struggle of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) against Selassie’s troops and those of the foul junta that overthrew him. As most of Hill’s acquaintances were EPLF fighters, readers get a good inside look at their political vision, a kind of Maoism scrubbed of Mao that advocated land reform, education, health care, and gender equality. Here, Hill (the novel The Drink and Dream Teahouse, 2001, etc.) shows, things get tricky: the Eritrean government, now under EPLF control, was still dedicated to social revolution, but the EPLF at its height had 60,000 members, and the nation’s three-million civilians would not so quickly adopt their policies. In a country that had essentially been reduced to rubble, full of war-ravaged people without jobs, any prospects for a rapid swing into democracy were slim. The new government played favorites, and the acting president seemed not at all eager to call elections. The revolution was crumbling, dreams were turning sour. All this emerges in Hill’s descriptions of his trips about the country with Eritrean friends, painted with the exquisiteness of Persian miniatures. Then it was back to fighting and goodbye to well-meaning foreigners. At embarkation, Hill writes bitterly, “Eritrea was returning to war and we were leaving them to it.”
A grim filigree of turmoil during peacetime.Pub Date: March 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-349-11774-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Abacus/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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
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
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