A boon for news junkies, full of solid, eye-opening reporting and smartly delivered opinion.
One man’s recent wanderings among Ground Zero, Saddam City, and other global hot spots.
Australian journalist McGeough is one of the most practiced foreign correspondents at work today, and though this narrative lacks the tight focus of Steven Brill’s After (p. 323) or Thomas Friedman’s Longitudes and Attitudes (2002), his observances from the field add considerable depth to recent headlines. Take, for instance, the case of the unfortunate Afghan warlord Ahmad Shah Masoud, assassinated by Al Qaeda operatives on September 9, 2001, and subsequently portrayed as a martyr in the antiterrorist cause; writes McGeough, “Because he was pitted against the tyrannical Taliban, he enjoyed a generous press that too often ignored the less attractive side of his own history, such as the massacre of members of the Hamza minority by his own men in Kabul in 1995, and the destruction of Kabul because of his stubborn refusal to abandon the capital during the Mujahideen wars in the early nineties.” Or take America’s support for another tyranny, the government of Uzbekistan, which one of McGeough’s confidants characterizes as “by far the Central Asian country with the worst record in human rights”—with the possible exception, that is, of Turkmenistan, whose people have no civil or political rights at all. Or take the Bush administration’s shift of the war on terror from Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein, a shift that McGeough carefully documents with undisguised skepticism. The most resonant portions here, for those recently glued to coverage of the war in Iraq, will be McGeough’s prescient notes before the fact on how the campaign would unfold, with a bombing campaign “the likes of which would not have been seen before” (read “shock and awe”) against carefully selected targets meant to bring the regime to its knees. As indeed happened, and if some of McGeough’s predictions are sometimes off by a hair or two, most are uncannily on the money.
A boon for news junkies, full of solid, eye-opening reporting and smartly delivered opinion.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-74114-099-4
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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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