A valiant effort of research and consolidation.
Bleak first-person accounts of violence and displacement in Colombia over many decades.
In a lawless struggle for power over the rural farmers and laborers who make up the landscape of this deeply scarred, war-torn country, left-wing guerrillas emerging in the 1960s and ’70s and the paramilitary right-wing opposing them from the ’80s onward, fueled by the drug profit and mafia cartels, have been responsible for thousands of senseless deaths and the upheaval of families and villages. Editors Brodzinsky and Schoening have compiled a useful, moving set of oral histories of this horrendous period of bizarre, seemingly arbitrary killings and intimidation. Instilling fear seemed to be the aim of the sudden appearance within a village of the ragtag left- or right-wing paramilitary men, who dragged people out of their homes to rape, maim and murder. Remembering the terror visited on her village of El Salado forms Emilia Gonzalez’s opening narrative—the paramilitary forces raped her 12-year-old daughter and herded the villagers onto the soccer field for a killing spree. Later, the victims might spot their tormentors in the army purportedly guarding the villages; there seemed to be no end to the absurdity of the violence. Death threats, forced planting of coca, bombings, maiming by mines, deliberate dismemberment, assassination of trade unionists and people seeking government redress and protection, and persecution of Colombian refugees who fled to Ecuador—these stories express a horrific experience and plea for humanitarian intervention. A helpful history of Colombia by Winifred Tate, timeline and glossary of terms close this extensive, poignant study.
A valiant effort of research and consolidation.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-936365-91-3
Page Count: 300
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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