Memorable personal stories that give much-needed depth and humanity to what are otherwise merely numbers.
A journalist and religion scholar who has traveled widely in the Middle East delivers poignant, humanizing stories of war refugees from Syria and Iraq.
In these stories, gleaned from travels in 2016 and 2017 in Iraq, Syria, Kurdistan, and Greece, Saldaña, the author of A Country Between and The Bread of Angels, uses the theme of what refugees in flight were able to carry with them—often only the clothes on their backs. On Aug. 6, 2014, the Islamic State group invaded an ancient Christian community in Qaraqosh, Iraq, and 44,000 Christians were forced to flee. In Amman, Jordan, where many relocated, the author met a woman named Hana, who described how she and the other women re-created their previous social world, in which the sewing of dresses was an important tradition. “So I learned that objects could speak or elicit a memory,” writes Saldaña. “And I learned that when the places you love begin to disappear, you begin to live in them all the time.” In Istanbul, she tracked down Hozan, a famous Kurdish buzuq player, and his musician friend Ferhad, both from al-Hasakeh, Syria, which was riven by that nation’s civil war. Saldaña also recounts the horrendous conditions in a refugee camp in Greece called Moria, which was designed for 2,300 people but, by 2017, housed more than 7,000. The author’s exploration of Moria is particularly heartbreaking, as she clearly portrays the awful plight of the refugees as well as the unwillingness of many Western countries to assist. Finally, Saldaña traveled to a convent in Germany where a group of Yazidi, “members of a small and highly persecuted religious minority from northern Iraq,” found shelter from the violence of IS. Throughout this compassionate book, the author demonstrates the resilience of refugees, who carry with them their precious languages, cultures, and memories.
Memorable personal stories that give much-needed depth and humanity to what are otherwise merely numbers.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781506484211
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Broadleaf Books
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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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