Fresh insight into how Europeans might learn valuable lessons from developing countries.
A longing for harmony and an embrace of multiculturalism mark this foreign correspondent’s examination of the European situation as seen from Brussels.
Married to a diplomat who moves around constantly, Aiyar (Chinese Whiskers, 2011, etc.) has previously recounted her stint in China. Here, she presents intriguing observations from her time in the unofficial European Union capital from 2009 to 2012. A feeling of malaise permeated her stint in Brussels—a city often seen as dull but simmering with linguistic rivalry (French vs. Dutch) and immigrant angst—beginning when she was robbed at the airport. As an Indian-born woman who had just arrived from the driven entrepreneurial Chinese capital of Beijing, Aiyar was stunned by the rules and regulations in this neat and tidy European capital and especially by the natives' aversion to work—that is, the relentless work pursued by the upstart Chinese and Indians, entailing long hours and sacrifices the Belgians are often not willing to make. In chapters devoted to different facets of the EU crises of the last few years, Aiyar looks at how demographic shifts are affecting business in a city where nearly a quarter of the population hails from Muslim countries; the lucrative Antwerp diamond industry is no longer a Jewish monopoly but has been infiltrated by the Mehtas and the Shahs. The Belgian workers might enjoy “some of the world’s most elaborate entitlements,” writes the author, but in an age of increasing austerity, “Europe’s clout was weakening.” Europeans, in contrast to the Chinese and Indians, might be environmentally conscious, but Aiyar is offended by their “smugness.” The author delves into ways the Indians and Chinese have managed to take advantage of Europe’s “protracted economic trough” by opening businesses in new areas—e.g., the pickled gherkin market.
Fresh insight into how Europeans might learn valuable lessons from developing countries.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-07231-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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
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
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