Of considerable interest to readers keeping an eye on West Africa.
Anthropological and historical account of the rise and fortunes of Boko Haram.
An archaeologist with 30 years’ fieldwork experience in the region, MacEachern (Anthropology/Bowdoin Coll.) writes that Boko Haram began only some 20 years ago on the ancient shores of fast-disappearing Lake Chad, in “a hot, sprawling, and somewhat ramshackle city of just over a million people.” The purist principles of the group—whose name, he points out, translates best to the phrase “deceitful education is forbidden,” which, he adds, “does not quite fit…with the Western reductionist images of the group as fundamentally ignorant and backward”—extend far back in time, but the leaders of Boko Haram looked to the Afghan Taliban as their more immediate models as agents of an austere regional power in the service of the larger caliphate. As MacEachern notes in this sometimes-arid but rich study, however, numerous political and ethnic rivalries come into play. The group’s original core emerged from a tribe that was notorious for raiding the region for slaves; when latter-day Boko Haram kidnap women with the aim of increasing their number, they are acting out an old pattern. The author reaches out from the anthropological to the political when he examines how Boko Haram has been allowed to operate in the area under the nose of the authorities; he notes that the Nigerian government could probably put an end to the group but asks, “what if exerting control over territory is not in the best interest of the people who are actually running the state?” It’s a provocative question, and even as outside powers—especially the U.S.—intervene militarily and politically, MacEachern predicts that if left alone, Boko Haram “will gradually fade into a condition of increased banditry, frontier lawlessness, and insurgency,” a minor irritant rather than a major threat in the Sahel.
Of considerable interest to readers keeping an eye on West Africa.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-19-049252-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
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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