An eye-opening look at how young survivors of wartime trauma can achieve postwar success.
The toll of war on the young.
Rebel armies abducted both boys and girls in the Sierra Leone Civil War, which inflicted tens of thousands of casualties and displaced more than 2 million people between 1991 and 2002. Some bore arms, others took roles as scouts, scavengers, cooks, or any other task their captors ordained. Extreme violence—including execution for minor offenses—and sexual abuse were commonplace, and many of the girls became pregnant. Not surprisingly, they encountered obstacles when returning to civilian life—PTSD, bullying and teasing at school, rejection by families and neighbors. After the war, Betancourt, then a Ph.D. student at Harvard, went to Sierra Leone to study how the survivors were adapting. Now a professor at Boston College, she tells some of their stories, as well as the stories of those who tried to help them become healthy, productive citizens. Not all succeeded. Many of the boys joined gangs or became drug addicts; many of the girls turned to sex work to support themselves and their own children. Those who escaped these traps usually did so with the support of their families and communities. Those working to help the survivors reintegrate found success by persuading family and respected elders to give the survivors support. Still, the programs were impeded by inadequate funding and staffing—there are only three practicing psychiatrists in the entire country—and by a traditional culture that stigmatized mental illness. General readers may find some of the text slow going because of technical jargon, but the story as a whole is inspiring. A bonus for many readers will be the close-up view of Sierra Leone, a country few Americans know well.
An eye-opening look at how young survivors of wartime trauma can achieve postwar success.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780674251052
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
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
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