Grist for a graduate seminar, but a slow grind for everyone else.
An expert in the region makes the case for the rise of Latin America.
“We are gold-eaters,” said Hernán Cortés to Moctezuma’s priests. It turned out that the conquistadores and their imperial successors were eaters of all Latin America’s riches, including silver, fruit, rubber, cacao, copper, sugar, lumber, oil and more. In the best passages, Guardiola-Rivera (International Law and International Affairs, Birkbeck College, Univ. of London; Being Against the World: Rebellion and Constitution, 2008) captures the greed of the conquerors, how their lust for gold stimulated world capitalism at its inception and how their drive for power choked off the enslaved Amerindians’ dream of a life centered on the collective welfare. That dream, he argues, is set for revival. With America’s political identity transformed as it becomes primarily Latino by 2040, with formerly subjugated nations emerging from the nightmare of colonial exploitation and countries like Brazil taking its place on the world stage and with the challenge of climate change and the global financial meltdown forcing reconsideration of political, social and economic models, the world will look to Latin America for instruction. The continent’s cultural lessons emerge from a tradition of rich social relations, environmental sensitivity, legal racial equality, antimilitarism and common access to and ownership of life’s essentials. Relying on archival documents and his own travels and interviews with government ministers, journalists and activists, Guardiola-Rivera assembles a richly allusive, if idiosyncratic history of the European conquest and the continent’s subsequent struggle against dependency. He easily mixes history’s familiars—e.g., Atahualpa, Columbus, Balboa, Bolívar, Murrieta, Guevara—with tales of lesser knowns like the adventurer William Walker and the entrepreneur Charles Flint, who fomented and profited from private wars against sovereign nations. The author manages far less successfully to persuade us that Latin America will assume such a prominent global leadership role. In a narrative marred by professor-speak, wordiness, leftist cliché and assertions masquerading as argument, the effect is ultimately wearying rather than convincing.
Grist for a graduate seminar, but a slow grind for everyone else.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60819-272-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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
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
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