An uplifting book that views some flawed figures through rose-colored glasses.
A heartfelt collection of life lessons inspired by changemakers.
Ghosh, a social impact strategist, combines memoir, biography, and practical advice in this book about the impact that 30 icons, mentors, and family members have made on his approach to service. “Lessons from others not only sustained me but helped me thrive,” he explains. The book opens with a lesson in empathy from his parents, whose generosity inspired the author to start a local community organization to address sanitation issues in the slums of Kolkata, India (Ghosh’s childhood home). The author recalls hearing the Dalai Lama (who contributes this book’s foreword) speak about the importance of showing respect and compassion for low-income citizens as entrepreneurs undertook various development initiatives across the Indian subcontinent and Africa. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg served as a role model of civility for Ghosh, who cites Ginsburg’s friendship with Justice Antonin Scalia as an example of her ability to respect and work with others across ideological lines. After meeting Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai in 2013, the author became inspired to speak out about important issues because she taught him that “silence is not an option.” Ghosh concludes with a touching chapter celebrating his son, Ryan, a young man with an adventurous spirit, the ability to embrace diversity, and a passion for fostering connection. The author’s personable voice will make his high-profile life of hobnobbing with globally renowned figures feel relatable to everyday readers—he describes how Mother Teresa made him feel “completely flooded with utter joy at her love, compassion, mercy, and greatness” with just the touch of her hand. However, the narrative occasionally praises controversial figures like Bill Clinton, about whom Ghosh gushes, “It was impossible not to like this man.” Still, the author’s empathy is evident in lines like, “Poverty is a condition created by a social construction that benefits some and not others. It is not a character flaw or a personal failing.” The text lists resources and organizations in each chapter to help readers engage in their own philanthropic efforts.
An uplifting book that views some flawed figures through rose-colored glasses.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9798888459249
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2025
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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