Wali leaves no stone unturned in this thoroughly researched analysis of the successes, failures and struggles of the Nigerian government in Sokoto State between 1976 and 1991.
In his exhaustively researched new study, Wali analyzes the social, cultural and economic obstacles Nigeria faces in its quest to modernize and improve the standard of living. The author seeks to explain why, in spite of the country’s relative wealth of human and natural resources, the great majority of Nigerians still struggle with crushing poverty. For a great many of the country’s citizens, there is very limited access to basics such as health care, education, clean water and safe housing. Wali shows how political instability, corruption and prejudice, among other factors, conspire to prevent policy implementation of what, on paper, can seem to be perfect solutions. While the author’s research is beyond reproach, his prose is often dense and impenetrable. The book is full of dry, circular sentences such as “without a goal, implementation will have no focus ... and there will be nothing to implement. In other words, there is no implementation without policy, but there may be policies waiting for implementation.” The various tables and charts, however, are much more instructive. As a former politician and ambassador, the author must have plenty of personal experience and anecdotes to draw from, but instead readers get numbing, policy-wonk descriptions of how the elaborate bureaucracy works—or more often, doesn’t work. As a result, no one he writes about feels like a real person. Even though Wali was on the ground to experience most of these issues, this volume reads like the work of an outsider peering in at the inner workings of the Nigerian state. A more personable tone, real-world examples and a less rigid structural format would have improved readability and greatly clarified the author’s message. An extremely valuable resource for political science students and those studying African economies and governments, but the author will have difficulty finding an audience beyond academia.
Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2010
ISBN: 978-1450217972
Page Count: 252
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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