A humane, responsible entry in a discourse marked by irresponsible inhumanity.
“This is not an ordinary place you can map out with a surveyor’s rod.” So, in this engaging memoir, notes Palestinian intellectual, politician and peace activist Nusseibeh of his lost homeland.
As his narrative opens, Harvard- and Oxford-educated Nusseibeh, long an informal advisor to Yassir Arafat, is awaiting “The Old Man’s” funeral procession in Gaza. Arafat had headed the Palestinian Liberation Organization and, by default, the Palestinian people for more than 40 years, and now in his absence there is every danger of Hamas and other extremist groups taking over, a prospect Nusseibeh dreads. “Arafat was not your run-of-the-mill Arab despot,” he writes, though he faults the leader for lagging behind his people, who really did want peace with Israel, a fact the PLO head seemed unwilling to accept. Ordinary Israelis seemed of a similar mind, though, he writes, the original partition had built an unworkable mess into the process from the start. Along the course of his narrative, Nusseibeh’s wayward politics earn him a savage beating, attacked by a group of young men whose own leader, it develops, is connected to the Jordanian intelligence service. As he recounts, he was in as much danger of being killed by Israeli extremists as Palestinians, but still he advocated a two-state solution, rejecting the idea that Israel should be pushed into the sea and refusing to resort to such rhetoric as “the Zionist entity,” now favored by Hamas, al-Qaeda and company. For his sins, Nusseibeh, apparently without political ambitions, was appointed the PLO administrator over Jerusalem, even though, he recounts, he had many disagreements with Arafat; he vigorously pressed for approaching the post-9/11 American government with the aim of “reconstituting the Camp David alliance,” which, he charges, the Barak government repudiated. “Israelis and Palestinians,” he insists here, “are not enemies at all. . . . If anything, we are strategic allies”—allies who ought to be living at peace.
A humane, responsible entry in a discourse marked by irresponsible inhumanity.Pub Date: April 3, 2007
ISBN: 0-374-29950-1
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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