A timely call to political participation on the part of immigrants, with useful advice for how to make it count.
An immigrant’s memoir of a life devoted to political activism and a call to others to take seriously the responsibility that democracy demands of its citizens.
Author Alam was born in Bangladesh in the crucible of political upheaval, later serving in the Freedom Fighters as a courier and working toward achieving independence from Pakistan. Those experiences helped ignite a lifelong passion for local politics and small-scale activism. In his first book, he documents decades of commitment to the representation of immigrants in the United States pushing others to move beyond cultural alienation in the direction of collective power. Alam moved to the United States in 1984 and quickly immersed himself in grass-roots political activities, joining the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, winning a seat on the local school board and eventually becoming recognized by the New York City Council for his efforts to overcome voter apathy (he was made a Voter Assistance Commissioner). Alam remained relentlessly motivated, running for state Senate and winning a seat as a Democratic Party delegate. Along the way, he gleaned some valuable lessons, particularly about the obstacles to progress posed by entrenched corruption and byzantine bureaucracy. Nonetheless, he always seems impressively undaunted: “For myself, I had several reasons for becoming a school board member: First, I had an altruistic outlook. I came to America believing that I should give back to my community and to our children. Secondly, I saw that position as a way of seeing the children improving because of our board’s actions. That was very promising. Thirdly, it was a possible steppingstone for me, too, as to any possible political positions I might choose to run for later on. Fourthly, I had three daughters in public school, so I had an immediate and direct interest in education.” The book includes newspaper clippings that mention the author and ends with a litany of his accomplishments, major and minor, signifying the central weakness of the book: its tirelessly self-congratulatory nature. But Alam’s belief in the power of the individual to incite political change is still infectiously endearing.
A timely call to political participation on the part of immigrants, with useful advice for how to make it count.Pub Date: April 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1497366329
Page Count: 206
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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