An admirable work of journalism in the interest of human rights.
A deeply informed account of Colombia’s decadeslong civil war and the many figures who profited from it.
The title of this journalistic account by Peruvian-American activist/writer Sánchez-Moreno, the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, is richly ironic. The civil war has led to countless deaths, as it pitted rival figures within the government and military against rightist paramilitaries, leftist guerrillas, and the drug cartels—but also produced strange alliances among them. As the author writes, “the war between the government and [revolutionary group] FARC certainly had ideological roots, but after forty years it had become much murkier.” Not that things were ever quite clear under the cartel’s terror campaign under Pablo Escobar, but one thing was certain: Colombia was a dangerous place to be, and if things are now much improved, there are plenty of ghosts around. At the heart of this story, among other atrocities, is a 1997 massacre of suspected guerrillas by paramilitaries, the investigation of which revealed how interlocked the players were and explained why the Colombian government had been so slow to intervene, even as Colombians were being raped, mutilated, and murdered by the thousands. The president of the nation was also implicated. Among Sánchez-Moreno’s crusading heroes, those who brought all this to light, are a government prosecutor and a reporter drawn into the story by a leak from a police intelligence agent, even as other agents “had put together lists of trade unionists and activists and passed those along to paramilitaries.” The story winds and unwinds, and although it sometimes staggers under its own weight, the author manages to keep all the threads together. In the end, readers are perhaps more numbed than surprised by how much corruption was revealed in the course of the investigations—though relieved as well that at least some remedies have been effected.
An admirable work of journalism in the interest of human rights.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-56858-579-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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