Fueled by the author’s outrage, the personal passages come alive, but they’re buried in a mass of data more suited to an...
Corporate executive Kara uses his business background to analyze the global sex-exploitation industry, in an attempt to stir action to eradicate it.
A former investment banker now on the board of the abolitionist organization Free the Slaves, the author inserts into his economic analysis poignant revelations of sex-trade victims and accounts of his personal struggles to find them, talk to them and expose their plight. Beginning in 2000, he traveled within India, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Italy, Moldova, Albania, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Mexico and the United States, interviewing sex workers in brothels and shelters, their families, police and attorneys, and even a brothel owner. He opens with an overview of the sex-exploitation industry and a list of the measures that he recommends be taken to do away with it. Each of the subsequent chapters focuses on a region of the globe and includes the disclosures made to him by young girls and women forced into the sex industry, his on-the-spot observations and often hair-raising experiences and his analysis of the structure of sex trafficking in that area. In India, he reports that thousands of young girls are shipped from poor villages in Nepal every year. In Europe, he finds that the trade is largely operated by organized crime, with Italy as the hub. In Eastern Europe, he cites governmental, judicial and law-enforcement corruption as the biggest hurdle to stopping the industry. The final chapter argues that longstanding global socioeconomic factors, such as extreme poverty and bias against women and ethnic minorities, determine the supply side of the industry. Therefore, he concludes, the short-term approach to abolition should focus on disrupting demand by raising the economic cost of being caught. Appendices cover other forms of slavery, such as bonded labor, and the specific economics of sex-slave establishments in various parts of the world.
Fueled by the author’s outrage, the personal passages come alive, but they’re buried in a mass of data more suited to an economics textbook.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-231-13960-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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