A revealing investigation of the complexities of UNESCO’s mission.
Dissension and controversy have plagued the identification and care of World Heritage sites.
Meskell (Anthropology/Stanford Univ.; The Nature of Heritage: The New South Africa, 2011, etc.) examines the origin, mission, and impact of UNESCO’s World Heritage program, offering a well-researched argument that UNESCO has become “a mere shadow of its former ambition for peace and mutual understanding between peoples.” The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization was founded in London in 1945, responding to the war’s “programmatic devastation of culture and heritage.” Its lofty mission was to foster peace, provide humanitarian assistance, and promote intercultural respect. This utopian goal included saving archaeological and cultural sites throughout the world, deeming them treasures for all of humanity. Meskell notes, to her regret, that archaeological research soon became subsumed “and heritage more likely to be considered architecture.” Rather than support excavations, which had the potential to reveal knowledge of the ancient past, UNESCO’s World Heritage program shifted to preservation and restoration of monuments that attracted tourism. Once described as “the laboratory of ideas,” UNESCO evolved into an “agency for branding” when it created a list of World Heritage sites that provoked competition among countries vying for the prestige of having a site inscribed. Because European nations were prominent in vetting the World Heritage List, non-Western countries felt slighted. Meskell portrays UNESCO as a bureaucracy mired in paper: “handbooks, manuals, guidelines, and other documents in multiple languages”; thousands of pages of documentation must be provided to support an application for inscription. Acceptance to the list sometimes causes unforeseen problems, as with Cambodia’s Preah Vihear Temple, for example, when inscription “inflamed a long-standing history of violence” between Cambodia and Thailand and involved the U.S., as well, when companies, such as Chevron, coveted access to natural gas reserves in the Gulf of Thailand. The creation of World Heritage sites, Meskell asserts, has “implications for power, authority, and legitimation” that may expose a “collision of worldviews” and even incite “dystopian scenarios” where terrorists or dissidents intentionally target listed sites.
A revealing investigation of the complexities of UNESCO’s mission.Pub Date: July 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-19-064834-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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