In this measured study, De Waal asserts his optimism that young scholars, freed from past narratives and drawing upon...
The causes and consequences of a crime against humanity.
Journalist, historian and senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, de Waal (The Caucasus: An Introduction, 2010, etc.) investigates an event still “highly politicized,” although it occurred a century ago: the massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 and 1916. Drawing on archival sources, interviews, contemporary newspaper accounts and current scholarship, the author assesses the context, and political and cultural aftermaths, of the atrocity that Armenians insist was genocide, an accusation that Turkey has consistently denied. De Waal presents evidence that the ruthless killings did not result from hatred and paranoia on the parts of all Turks and Kurds but rather were fomented by Turkish Unionist leaders intent on pushing the country into modernity. As one historian argued, some mass atrocities have been incited when a minority identified as “primitive” is “perceived as a threat and ultimately destroyed.” The Armenian narrative about the massacre became complicated after 1944, when a Polish-Jewish lawyer coined the term “genocide,” which he defined as “the mass slaughter of a national group.” In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which stipulated that acts against the victim group were punishable if “committed with intent to destroy.” Turkey hotly denied that “intent” could be proved. Later, with increased attention on the Holocaust, the term “genocide” generated controversy when Holocaust survivors and historians objected to its application to anything other than the Nazi extermination of Jews. For generations, what to call the event has made a Turkish-Armenian dialogue impossible.
In this measured study, De Waal asserts his optimism that young scholars, freed from past narratives and drawing upon “hidden histories of the Armenians,” will amplify what is known about the late Ottoman period and complicate a history that both sides have tried mightily to own. A perfect scholarly complement to Meline Toumani’s outstanding memoir, There Was and There Was Not (2014).Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-19-935069-8
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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