A perfect bedside companion for news junkies—and anyone else seeking a range of views on how things came to be so messy in...
“Nobody can just scratch Iraq off their calendar,” remarks a Baathist official at the close of this useful—and all too timely—collection on the dictator who has caused the Bush dynasty so many conniptions.
Few of the contributors to London-based Munthe’s anthology have particularly kind things to say about Saddam Hussein; Munthe (Commissioning Editor, Politicis and Middle East Studies/IB Tauris Publishers) comes closest by remarking that though a “tyrant,” the Iraqi president-for-life “is also, by any standards, a heroic leader.” (Readers may rush to suggest standards Munthe has perhaps not considered.) Saddam himself has some of the first words, remarking that “the Arab nation is the source of all prophets and the cradle of civilization,” professing his admiration for V.I. Lenin “because he deals with life in a lively manner,” and closing by adding, “I do not believe nuclear weapons can be used for peaceful, scientific purposes in an underdeveloped, bedouin society.” Most other writers here are more comprehensible. Among the most skillful pieces are those by leftist journalist Christopher Hitchens, who suggests, with good reason, that the US wants a Saddamist Iraq, only without Saddam; Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya, who offers a charged account of Saddam’s war against Shiite Muslims in southern Iraq immediately following his defeat in the Gulf War; and Jerusalem Post reporter Heidi Kingstone, who writes that “about 40 people are in the running” to assume leadership in the event that Bush the younger forces a regime change. Few of those 40, by Kingstone’s account, give the West cause for cheer at the prospect of Saddam’s being run out of town. This is all thrown off-balance by the absence of official apologists for the Bush administrations, although a few Washington think-tank types come close to filling that role in pressing the case to remove Saddam at whatever cost necessary.
A perfect bedside companion for news junkies—and anyone else seeking a range of views on how things came to be so messy in Mesopotamia.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56025-428-9
Page Count: 592
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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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