A fully realized portrait of a nation struggling to survive its internal divisions and hatreds.
A clear account of the dystopian politics of Pakistan.
Journalist Schmidle arrived in February 2006, as the authoritarian rule of Pervez Musharraf was coming under attack. Along the northern border, Taliban forces were demonstrating increasing strength, controlling broad swaths of territory and ruling with merciless efficiency. Meanwhile, traditional religious parties battled each other, particularly the Sunni and Shia Muslims. There was also ethnic strife of all varieties, among such groups as the Baluchis, Punjabs, Sindhis, Pashtuns and Muhajirs, as well as the nationalist movement for a liberal, secular Pakistan. As a young reporter, Schmidle attempted to make sense of everything by traveling to where the story was and speaking to those making it. It was a dangerous game—reporter Daniel Pearl had been kidnapped and brutally murdered a few years earlier for attempting the same thing. Schmidle traveled to the north to interview emerging Taliban leaders and arranged clandestine meetings with radical Islamic clerics, one of whom was soon killed in an attack. He traveled with ethnic rebels and marched with student protestors, all the while avoiding the attention of the ubiquitous government intelligence agencies. The author lets his subjects speak, allowing the reader to understand the logic of their emotions and intentions—some evil are evil, some benign, but all are more than political caricatures of the Western imagination. Schmidle also follows the return from exile of popular former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, and her near-immediate assassination, as well as the August 2008 resignation of Musharraf.
A fully realized portrait of a nation struggling to survive its internal divisions and hatreds.Pub Date: May 12, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8938-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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