As this fine book shows, when it comes to Western interactions with Africa, meaning well is a necessary but far from...
In her sure-to-be-controversial first book, Christian Science Monitor correspondent Hanes investigates why so many Western-led conservation efforts in Africa go so wrong so often.
The author’s answers are not especially reassuring, nor are they intended to be. At the center of her story is the Gorongosa National Park in central Mozambique, a park that well-meaning Western businessman-turned-conservationist Greg Carr has championed for many years. Certainly Carr is no villain. He sees himself coming from a human rights–driven tradition, he is earnest in his desire to save African wildlife, and he has many admirers and supporters. However, earnestness, fawning admirers, and good intentions don’t always guarantee positive outcomes. One of the author’s central arguments is that Westerners tend to seize upon a single narrative strain when they engage in conservation efforts in Africa, ignoring other stories, including those that come from the voices of the local populations, who are most likely to face the unintended consequences of these efforts. Hanes chronicles many examples of Western interventions, especially in southern Africa, and shows how most of them have ended up falling far short of their goals. For all of its supporters’ ambitions, the Gorongosa project is at best a mixed bag. It is telling that in recent months, as the author reveals in the afterword, an increasingly coordinated campaign of intimidation and disinformation emanating from Carr and his many well-connected allies has tried to fight this book’s publication. Hanes falls short of posing her own solutions beyond recommending listening to other voices and narratives—a vitally important point, to be sure—but her skepticism comes from deep research and far-ranging interviews. She writes gracefully and sympathetically, and regardless of whatever campaign emerges to discredit this book, a disquieting but hardly hostile work, she is fair and convincing.
As this fine book shows, when it comes to Western interactions with Africa, meaning well is a necessary but far from sufficient condition.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9716-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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
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
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