Visceral reporting of Colombia drug gang trauma by a committed journalist.
A Colombian journalist tracks the traumatic life of a former teenage soldier in a rural guerrilla group.
In 2016, the Colombian government negotiated a truce with the guerrilla group called the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Nonetheless, the menacing activities of drug-trafficking gangs has not ceased in that beleaguered nation. Delgado-Kling, a journalist who grew up in a privileged household in Bogotá, recounts the odd intersection of her own life and that of Leonor, a poor farmer’s daughter who was caught up in the drug wars in the mid-1990s. As a child of prominent officials, the author was sent to Canada to be educated due to the threats of violence and kidnapping. “Between 1970 and 2013,” she writes, “39,058 people were kidnapped. Many cases were not reported for fear of retribution from the captors.” Delgado-Kling never traveled in Colombia without a bodyguard—even as a journalist, when she first met Leonor after she’d been freed from FARC captivity at age 17. Slowly, the two became friends. During numerous exchanges over the course of nearly two decades, Leonor shared her story: the family’s forced move to Mocoa from their farm due to FARC threats; numerous incidents of sexual assault; her brother’s work as a drug mule; her sister’s brutal murder, after which her body was tossed into the street; the lure into FARC, which served first as a haven but soon became a nightmare, with Leonor enduring sexual slavery under a man 34 years her senior; and her eventual capture by government troops and rehabilitation over many years. In the end, Leonor’s story has no neat resolution, but Delgado-Kling never wavers in her devastating portrait of unspeakable suffering. The author offers a helpful bibliography for further reading about the fraught situation in Colombia.
Visceral reporting of Colombia drug gang trauma by a committed journalist.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781682194478
Page Count: 250
Publisher: OR Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
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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