The welter of unfamiliar names of places, organizations and people makes for slow reading (maps and a cast of characters...
Once again, a journalist familiar with African politics, economics and culture tells a shocking story of widespread corruption, greed and bloody violence, this time in a region rich in tin and coltan, minerals used in the manufacture electronic devices.
As Africa Editor for the Institute for War & Peace Reporting at The Hague, Eichstaedt (Pirate State: Inside Terrorism at Sea, 2010; etc.) traveled around the eastern Congo giving workshops to train local journalists and talking to militia leaders, former child soldiers, businessmen, aid workers and victims. A two-chapter side journey into neighboring Sudan, which seems rather out-of-place here, demonstrates that ethnic rivalries and fighting over a country’s resources is not unique to the Congo. However, the eastern Congo has become “the rape capital of the world”—and, with more than five million dead in the last decade, the site of “the deadliest human catastrophe since World War II.” Eichstaedt’s reporting reveals in grim detail how rival ethnic militias and the national Congolese army fight for control over the region’s rich mines, how villagers are routinely slain with guns or machetes or by being burned alive, how pick-and-shovel miners are heavily taxed by unpaid soldiers and how rape has become a tactic of war. In their own words, his interviewees often provide unrealistic solutions to their predicament or show a calm acceptance of the chaos and violence around them. The answer, writes the author, is not simply a ban on “conflict minerals” as was recently instituted by the United States, or peace-keeping efforts by the United Nations; it must come from the Congolese people demanding responsible government. Eichstaedt does not offer much hope that it will happen soon.
The welter of unfamiliar names of places, organizations and people makes for slow reading (maps and a cast of characters would have helped), but the main stumbling block for many will be the sheer horror and hopelessness of it all.Pub Date: July 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56976-310-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
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
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