A fascinating, enjoyable history, only mired at times by hiccups in the narrative.
Mouat, a member ofthe Council on Foreign Relations and the Academic Council on the United Nations System, presents an insightful if overly long look at the eight United Nations secretaries-general.
Since its tumultuous beginning at the end of the fiasco known as the League of Nations as well as the Second World War, the United Nations strove to represent the many varied interests and needs of its participating countries. As the cornerstone of her history of the assemblage’s leaders, Mouat focuses on those attempts and the inherent difficulties with the job: “The secretary-general heads no government. The people of the world did not elect him. He has no standing military forces at his disposal. He has no intelligence service. His bargaining power is limited. He cannot dictate or enforce UN policy.” Additionally, he—the secretaries-general have all been men—has often been caught between the disparate desires of the East and West. After an all too brief but nonetheless interesting accounting of the origins behind the United Nations, Mouat dives into the story of the first secretary-general, Trygve Halvdan Lie. Within each lengthy biographical chapter, Mouat begins with the political machinations behind the relevant election—the Security Council nominates a candidate, who is elected by the General Assembly—followed by some relatively brief discussions about the man’s personal history, several sections devoted to the conflicts and struggles during his term, and finally a summation of his time in office. For the most part, Mouat, who previously covered the U.N. for The Christian Science Monitor, delivers excellent work. Given Mouat’s extensive journalistic experience, it’s surprising that the narrative sometimes becomes tangled, with potentially fascinating tidbits getting buried. In particular, in the pages that follow the death of the second secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld, the book spends too long reiterating what has largely already been said.
A fascinating, enjoyable history, only mired at times by hiccups in the narrative.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1484806197
Page Count: 530
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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