by Shelly Culbertson ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 19, 2016
A well-documented, brave, and useful overview.
A journey through the Middle East in the post–Arab Spring landscape.
A journalist and RAND Corporation research manager in Qatar, American-born Culbertson (Education of Syrian Refugee Children: Managing the Crisis in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan, 2015, etc.) traveled recently to six Middle East countries she believes are most indicative of the vast changes taking place in the region since the political upheavals in 2011. Tunisia was the catalyst when in January of that year, the self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi ignited national unrest, and a true revolution then convulsed Egypt with the overthrow of a long-running dictator. The author’s curious choice of non-Arab Turkey underscores the profound and unsettling changes in the region that mirror the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. Indeed, she posits, the struggle for the formation of legitimate nation-states began then, accompanied by “a troubled story of population swaps, ethnic cleansing, iron-fisted dictators, civil wars, and popular backlash,” all establishing a pattern similar to what is occurring in these countries today. After presenting an overview of observations about the region as a whole—including the emphasis on the region’s diversity, the struggle to delineate Islam’s role in government, balancing the modern versus the past, the emancipation of women, and the inclusion of the overwhelming youthful demographic—Culbertson takes a deep look at each country in turn and asks the people involved what the revolution achieved for them. The answers vary widely: Egypt, having slipped back into dictatorship, is the bad example, and yet Egyptian women are leading the way in demanding change; Tunisia remains the imperfect model for reconciling the secular and the religious; Iraq, beset by the Islamic State group, threatens to splinter; entrepreneurial Jordan has proven surprisingly stable despite its massive refugee crisis; and Qatar, the wealthiest of the lot, is meddlesome and interventionist. Authoritarianism continues to strangle the region and its emerging institutions, and Culbertson follows it all with aplomb.
A well-documented, brave, and useful overview.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-06704-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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