Of vital interest to many kinds of readers, particularly those who share the author’s view that we are fighting a war that...
Want al-Qaeda to win? Then let the Pentagon handle the fight against that Islamist faction, which just won’t go away.
Scheuer (Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq, 2008, etc.), former chief of the CIA unit charged with tracking al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden, writes that the Western powers have “failed miserably in every conceivable way” in containing the terrorist group and eliminating the threat it poses. Instead, its growth appears constant, while the United States, he argues, “remains largely undefended.” Indeed, he writes, the American-led handling of the fight seems almost calculated to ensure Islamist victory, inasmuch as it helps accomplish the aims of bleeding our treasury, stretching our military to the breaking point and isolating us by destroying former alliances with other powers. The U.S. government has known of bin Laden’s commitment to destroy the West and kill Westerners, and particularly Americans, since 1996, but we have come no closer to accepting that the man is serious; our understanding of him and his cause barely moves beyond caricature. Scheuer examines the various “narratives” that have been constructed and finds them wanting in the face of known realities. One, apparently favored by the Saudi government in an effort to distance itself from bin Laden, born of an influential Saudi family, was that he was a wastrel and the son of a “Syrian-born outsider,” charges that are laughably untrue. Another, advanced by Victor Hanson Davis and other neoconservatives, throws around words like “Islamofascist” and turns a deaf ear to anything the Islamists have to say about their situation, which may turn up a legitimate complaint or two. Rightist media commentators in particular, writes Scheuer, are useless but influential—“they offer politicians an easy way out.” The author paints a careful portrait of his subjects and notes the ideological disagreements that divide elements of the Islamist movement, offering a program by which to combat “a formidable enemy, one whom we have almost willfully misunderstood.”
Of vital interest to many kinds of readers, particularly those who share the author’s view that we are fighting a war that may soon reach our shores.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-19-973866-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
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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