A well-argued, well-observed journey into a little-known area likely to be of much importance in days to come.
After tagging along with Daily Telegraph correspondent Kleveman on this vivid, well-narrated spin through the oil-rich Caspian region, anyone who believed that the recent American invasion of Iraq was about countering terrorism might want to reconsider.
That trumped-up war, Kleveman writes, was just one episode in the developing “New Great Game”—the old one being the 19th-century race between Russia and Great Britain for control of Central Asia—that is now playing out between East and West, and more pointedly among the three poles of a fundamentalist Islam, a protective Russia, and an energy-hungry US. (China figures in there, too, as does Iran, which Kleveman believes is a more serious contender.) Wherever the author travels, he turns up convincing evidence of the international race to secure the mineral wealth of the Caspian Sea basin, “the world’s biggest untapped fossil fuel resources,” at least three times larger than stores within the US, potentially representing some five percent of the world market. All of which explains, he thinks, why American interests began working in the 1990s to build a pipeline from the bizarre dictatorship of Turkmenistan—“Stalin’s Disneyland,” in Kleveman’s memorable phrase—through Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and on to the Indian Ocean, much to the annoyance of Russia’s Yeltsin and Putin administrations. The author provides plenty of whip-smart asides to entertain and enlighten the armchair traveler: “Turkmenistan is probably the only country in the world where a taxi to the airport is more expensive than the ensuing flight”; “The cockpit door opens, and one of the two Ukrainian pilots greets me with a heavy accent and a strong whiff of vodka, ‘Come in! Welcome! No problem, don’t worry, no problem!’ ” They do not detract from the solid case he builds for thinking that American adventurism in the region is less about national security than about lining the pockets of oil industry executives.
A well-argued, well-observed journey into a little-known area likely to be of much importance in days to come.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-87113-906-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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