Bennoune, and those she profiles, bravely meets the tide of extremism with a sense of shared community and nonviolent...
A human rights lawyer scours the global hotspots for stories of Muslim push back to fundamentalism.
Fired with a sense of outrage, Bennoune (Law/Univ. of California, Davis) applies the lessons she learned from her professor and activist father, Mahfoud Bennoune—put on the “kill list” by fundamentalist extremists in Algeria in the early 1990s—in meeting the challenge of today’s fundamentalists. Muslim fundamentalism—which the author defines carefully as an extreme-right movement that achieves political aims by manipulating religion, embracing absolutism, limiting women’s rights and other human rights, denouncing secularism and advocating the imposition of narrowly defined Sharia—actually perpetuates much more violence against Muslims than against Westerners. The fallacy entertained by the Western left, such as her former employer she takes to task, Amnesty International, is that some forms of Islamic fundamentalism can be moderate or appear palatable (skillful as such groups are in “double discourse”), such as the freshly washed face of the Islamic Brotherhood. This is mostly due to the fact that the West desperately needs to believe “someone has to control those Muslims.” However, Bennoune is uncompromising in presenting tales from the trenches of the terror imposed by these ideologically driven governments: arts groups for children in Lahore, Pakistan, targeted for bombing since music was declared haram (shameful); cinemas burned in Herat, Afghanistan; women stoned in Nigeria; polygamy encouraged by Hamas and on the rise in Gaza; journalists killed for speaking out from Algeria to Pakistan. Yet the author’s account brings to light the courageous few who do stand up at the peril of losing their lives—e.g., many women who have had enlightened fathers who supported their education, like the author.
Bennoune, and those she profiles, bravely meets the tide of extremism with a sense of shared community and nonviolent purpose.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-393-08158-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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
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