Serviceable but ponderous. Best for those engaged in humanitarian-aid and international-development work, but readers...
The Aral Sea of Central Asia has all but disappeared within the space of a generation. Writes international-aid consultant and debut author Ferguson, “the disaster was ultimately caused by the sort of mad obsession that lays claim to the human conscience when it carries out a murder.”
Murder figures heavily in these slow-moving pages: Toward the end of what has for Ferguson been an already bad year, 40-something Shakhlo Abdullayeva, his alluring raven-haired assistant, turns up dead, and he finds himself under suspicion of killing her. She has been but one of the long line of people skimming from the World Bank–funded Aral Sea project on which Ferguson has been fruitlessly laboring as a kind of p.r. flack: “The goal of the public awareness component,” he explains to the Uzbekistani cop who’s grilling him, “is to persuade the people of Central Asia that water has to be saved so that the Aral Sea can be saved.” Chalk up victim number two, the Aral Sea, condemned to death by the Soviet Union’s insatiable need for thirsty cotton, used in military uniforms, armaments, truck tires and other such strategically important things. It does not help that the cop laughs at him, like just about everyone else in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan who, seeing the foreigners coming, nurse sugarplum dreams of siphoning off their funds, never mind all their good intentions. In the end, for many reasons, the project fails before Ferguson even has a chance to see the Aral Sea for himself. One agent of that failure is a memorably wily figure, an old-school apparatchik whose purpose in life seems to be to thwart Ferguson’s ambitions, and he does so with a single-minded purpose that, Ferguson hints, just may have had something to do with Abdullayeva’s death.
Serviceable but ponderous. Best for those engaged in humanitarian-aid and international-development work, but readers seeking depth on the Aral issue will do better to turn to Tom Bissell’s much superior Chasing the Sea (2003).Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-55192-599-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Raincoast
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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