An impassioned, eye-opening take on a critical African nation.
Political repression, rampant corruption, ethnic and sectarian strife, crumbling infrastructure, energy shortages, and an economy hooked on oil and mining all make Africa’s most populous country a basket case, according to this hard-hitting jeremiad.
Debut author Nwadiaru ranges through Nigeria’s history since it gained independence in 1960, finding in it a story of vast potential and natural resources that have been squandered by misrule. He gives rundowns of the many coups and military regimes that have disfigured the country, but he finds periods of elected civilian rule scarcely better; he describes President Olusegun Obasanjo, elected in 1999 after 15 years of military rule, as “the most brutal and arrogant leader Nigeria has ever had” and notes that his successor ruled Nigeria for three months from a Saudi hospital. Nwadiaru exposes the toxic political culture that underpinned these dysfunctional regimes, which included pervasive violence against opposition politicians, journalists, labor unions, human rights groups, and indigenous organizations; omnipresent corruption involving everyone from local officials to first ladies; cunning politicos who manipulated and subverted even well-intentioned leaders; and an ambient “moral laxity” he sees in Nigerian society that seems resigned to gross ethical compromises. From politics the rot has spread, he contends, giving the country bad roads, inadequate schools and health care, a skimpy and unreliable electricity supply, a steep decline in farm productivity, a dependence on royalties from an oil industry that has bred insurgency in oil-rich areas; and a moribund economy that makes talented Nigerians flee the country. Although the book could use a stronger copy edit, Nwadiaru’s prose is for the most part lucid, well-organized, and stuffed with telling details. (Occasionally, though, it bogs down in too much detail, as in a 20-page reprint of anti-corruption statutes.) The author’s anguish at the conditions in his country is palpable, but he still delivers clear analysis and measured judgments on problems and needed reforms. Americans who know Nigeria mainly for its Islamic Boko Haram terrorists and internet scams will find this book an informative guide to the country’s larger discontents.
An impassioned, eye-opening take on a critical African nation.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63268-927-6
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Tate Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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