Unlike John R. Bradley’s skeptical After the Arab Spring (2012), Bishara does not believe the Islamists are poised to co-opt...
Al-Jazeera English’s chief political analyst offers a keen, journalistic look at the making of the Arab Spring and its ramifications.
Bishara (Palestine/Israel, 2001, etc.) characterizes the “invisible Arab” as the benumbed masses long brutalized under the military dictatorships of Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi and others who finally found their voice in the Arab Spring uprisings. The corruption, oppression and sheer ineptitude of the Arab world’s autocratic rulers had long been acknowledged and monitored by U.S. officials (as revealed in recent WikiLeaks documents), yet the leaders had been propped up for “economic and strategic interests.” How have the once-mighty Arab people been kept down for so long? Bishara starts with the “humiliation” and “sadistic paternalism” caused by the arbitrary division of the Arab world by the imperialist powers, creating a corrupt, rapacious regime comprised of populist military leaders who consolidated power under the enabling complacency of the U.S. or Soviet leaders. A uniform ruling ideology kept their families and cronies in power, and democratic and Islamic movements in check. Yet the “miracle generation” has emerged with the information revolution, making the people “visible in public spaces” not through suicide bombings but by “the affirmation of life, dignity, and liberty through their protests.” From humble beginnings, community activists and coalition builders, marginalized, voiceless labor unions and women built the protest movement, from Tunisia to Egypt, and emboldened others. Bishara also looks at the negative role of the ayatollahs and Saudi Arabians and the positive role of Al-Jazeera and social media.
Unlike John R. Bradley’s skeptical After the Arab Spring (2012), Bishara does not believe the Islamists are poised to co-opt the revolution, but sees more “creative thinking” in the Arab transformation.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-56858-708-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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