Despite largely ignoring politics, war, and culture, Amrith’s thought-provoking history makes a fascinating case that water...
A compelling history of India over the last 200 years mostly describing how its people and rulers have dealt with the weather.
Amrith (History and South Asian Studies/Harvard Univ.; Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants, 2013, etc.), a MacArthur fellow, reminds readers that India contains great rivers and a famous monsoon, but these deliver only 4 percent of the world’s fresh water to 14 percent of its population. He also reminds us that Britain ruled India to make money; even the cost of government and military operations came from Indian taxpayers. Agricultural products, the source of most of this wealth, depended heavily on monsoon rains; when they diminished, famines occurred and tax collections dropped. Documented since ancient times, famines probably became more severe with population growth in the 19th century and the effect of British rule. Most people believed that modern technology would fix matters. Amrith mines British and Indian archives to produce a lively history whose heroes, mostly obscure, developed modern meteorology and built railroads, irrigation projects, canals, and especially dams. “Dams were the single largest form of public investment in modern India,” writes the author, “swallowing considerably more government expenditure than health care or education….More than any other technology, they promised a mastery of nature.” Major famines as late as 1943 only reinforced this policy. Nationalists were also believers, and following independence, there was a greater push for more projects. The author documents innumerable missteps and suffering but admits that it worked. Many Indians still go hungry, but food production has vastly increased. Still, Amrith doesn’t avoid the bad news about the future. Global warming is melting Himalayan snows that feed Asian rivers and worsening the weather, and India is already quarreling with neighboring nations when their actions threaten to divert river water.
Despite largely ignoring politics, war, and culture, Amrith’s thought-provoking history makes a fascinating case that water is equally important, perhaps more so.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-465-09772-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
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
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
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