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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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