Dumper's partiality toward the Palestinians is obvious, and this book provides a solid counterpoint to Caroline Glick’s...
After almost 25 years of studying Jerusalem, Dumper (Middle East Politics/Univ. of Exeter; The Future for Palestinian Refugees, 2007, etc.) lays out a clear picture, with plenty of maps, showing the rat’s maze of boundaries in the holy city.
These borders include not just the Green Line of the 1949 Armistice, the post–Six Day War border, the municipal boundary or the 2003 barrier erected by the Israeli government. There are also unseen borders in the education and electoral policies. The strongest barrier is the classification of Palestinians as either “citizens,” with a right to vote, or “permanent residents,” who are effectively treated as immigrants in their own land. All live under policies that exclude them from certain employment and residential zones and subject them to confiscation of land and property. In addition, their infrastructure and public services are inferior while police surveillance is increased. The author tries to explain both sides of the conflict in deciding whether to separate the city or find a way to share its administration. As part of the project Conflict in Cities and the Contested States, Dumper has seen solutions in divided cities that could lead to some degree of success in this seemingly intractable situation. There is no doubt that the key to peace is Jerusalem, and the author points out the most contentious issues—among, them, Israeli security concerns, the question of the sites holy to three different religions and Palestinian sovereignty east of the 1949 line. The many borders are all fluid; they are not irreversible, and when there is an incentive for the Israeli government to concede territory, there may be peace—though the author realistically states that it won’t be soon.
Dumper's partiality toward the Palestinians is obvious, and this book provides a solid counterpoint to Caroline Glick’s recent manifesto, The Israeli Solution.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-231-16196-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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
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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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