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
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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