Tales of corruption and compromise, of interest to anyone who’s ever contributed to a humanitarian aid organization.
A veteran foreign affairs journalist reports on the 21st-century crises confronting international humanitarian aid organizations.
To trace Osama bin Laden to his compound, U.S. intelligence enlisted a senior Pakistani health officer to initiate a phony campaign to inoculate citizens against hepatitis B. In Somalia, Bancroft Global Development trains local forces to fight against the al-Shabab insurgents and also, notwithstanding its NGO label, sponsors its own investment operation. The founder of International Relief and Development retired in 2014 after reports about his agency’s lavish compensation and overspending culminated in a Washington Post headline: “Doing Well By Doing Good.” As he relates these and other abuses, Gill (Famine & Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid, 2010, etc.) embeds within his brisk, hard-hitting narrative the inspiring origin stories of three of our most revered aid agencies—The International Committee of the Red Cross, Oxfam, and Save the Children—and underscores the noble founding principles that animated each: independence, neutrality, and impartiality. With the honorable exception of the Red Cross, and relative newcomers like Médecins Sans Frontières, few organizations, including the U.N., remain faithful to this doctrine. Aggressive advertising and unbecoming concerns about institutional growth have helped transform modern aid into “a mighty, money-spinning industry,” but the war on terror has also placed peculiar strains on what should be the disinterested mission of alleviating human suffering. Gill’s informed, on-the-ground reporting from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Syria demonstrates how Western aid agencies have, through their increasing reliance on government funding, surrendered their independence. Understandably fearful for their own security, they’ve tied humanitarian efforts to the military and political goals of those same governments, arousing severe mistrust among Muslims in particular. Dreading falling afoul of counterterrorism laws, they’ve abandoned efforts to connect with the victims they should be helping. Gill’s reporting exposes an almost fatal falling away from first principles that the Western humanitarian movement must address to regain its effectiveness and its moral soul.
Tales of corruption and compromise, of interest to anyone who’s ever contributed to a humanitarian aid organization.Pub Date: June 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78360-123-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Zed Books
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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