Lucid, often surprisingly funny: a very welcome contribution to our understanding of this tragic nation.
An instructive memoir by an Afghan-American thrust into the news after September 11, 2001.
On September 12, responding to talk-show callers who urged that Afghanistan be nuked or otherwise pounded into submission, Microsoft Encarta columnist Ansary wrote an impassioned E-mail defending his native country. “Bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age would be redundant,” he wrote. “Twenty-three years of war had taken care of that already. The horrific crime in New York was not committed by the Afghan people, but by nationless thugs who had moved into ruined Afghanistan like rats into rubble.” Widely circulated, the E-mail brought Ansary to international attention, affording him both the celebrity and the occasion for this memoir. Born in Kabul in 1948 into an influential family, Ansary lived in two worlds from the start by virtue of having an American mother. When his family was forced to leave Afghanistan at the outbreak of the long civil war, Ansary relocated to the US, grew his hair to his waist, listened to rock ’n’ roll, and became an American—but always with a backward glance at his homeland, which clearly could have used his talents and level-headedness. He had an opportunity to revisit his native culture when reporting on militant Islam for the Pacific News Service, which, he writes, required that he put a Marxist, materialist slant on what he considers to be the “spiritual and not material hunger” of the young adherents to fundamentalist theology. Much of this slender book is given to recounting Ansary’s travels through North Africa and the Middle East, where he hears many variations, some of them quite twisted, on the themes of Jewish evil, American perfidy, and Islamic superiority. This reportage is highly useful for anyone seeking to understand the Muslim world’s hatred for the West, and it adds much to an already thoughtful consideration.
Lucid, often surprisingly funny: a very welcome contribution to our understanding of this tragic nation.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-28757-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
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