Eminently debatable, but a necessary contribution to the literature surrounding both humanitarian aid and African...
How do we know that genocide is taking place in Darfur? “Because we are told it is,” writes Mamdani (Government/Columbia Univ.; Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, 2004, etc.), who argues that it is not.
While serving as George W. Bush’s secretary of state, Colin Powell declined to characterize the unfolding events in Darfur as genocidal, saying, “why would we call it genocide when the genocide definition has to meet certain legal tests?” But Powell, pressured by others in the government, eventually claimed that genocide was indeed being committed, abetted by the government of Sudan—the first time, Mamdani writes, that one government had ever accused another of the act. Mamdani examines those legal tests, concluding that, whereas events in Rwanda and the Congo in the last two decades fall into the category of genocide, those in Darfur do not. That is not to say that Westerners should not act to relieve the civilian suffering that has resulted from Sudan’s brutal counterinsurgency campaign. It is just, Mamdani argues, that there is a difference between knowledge and moral certainty, and “the lesson of Darfur is a warning to those who act first and understand later.” The author limns a tightly constructed history of central Africa that places Darfur in the context not only of regional tensions among the neighboring states of Chad and Sudan and of ethnic tensions among Arabs and black Africans, but also of the larger Cold War and the interplay of client states serving the superpowers—and, later, the superpower of Washington on one hand and the regional power of Libya on the other. His argument that Darfur is the inevitable result of proxy war is well taken, but his evident contempt for the Western intervention effort—in which Darfurians “are not citizens in a sovereign political process as much as wards in an open-ended international rescue operation”—takes an unhelpfully contrarian tone given that, after all, actual lives are at stake.
Eminently debatable, but a necessary contribution to the literature surrounding both humanitarian aid and African geopolitics.Pub Date: March 17, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-37723-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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