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KOSOVO

CONTENDING VOICES ON BALKAN INTERVENTIONS

Intellectually challenging but very readable, this examination of the most troubling European turmoil of the last decade is...

A wonderfully diverse collection of essays, memoirs, letters, and interviews that comprises a robust spectrum of views on the Kosovo conflict and the NATO air campaign.

Buckley (Ethics/Georgetown Univ.) has brought together contributions from many of the major stars of the international community—UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Vaclav Havel, and Henry Kissinger, to name a few. What makes his collection even more impressive, however, are the pieces from unknown local figures—the Serbian citizens, the Kosovar victims of Serb aggression, and European journalists—who serve to question the realities and perceived realities of the outside observers on both sides of the Atlantic. Ivanka Besevic, an elderly Serbian woman living in Belgrade writes on the NATO bombing: “We are here, and we see it with our own eyes; every civilian target, our neighbors’ homes.” The compilation takes the reader on a tour of the complicated truth behind such simple questions as who exactly the KLA are—without providing any one answer to the perennial question that should trouble Americans most: Was the NATO bombing the right thing to do? If anything, these inquiries highlight just how problematic military intervention is. Was it necessary? The account we are offered of Serb atrocities says the answer is yes. Was it just? Accounts from the Serb perspective, in addition to rigorous political analyses from Kissinger and others tell us perhaps not. Can the peacekeeping operations be called a success? According to Buckley, that remains to be seen. His collection, although it is about as comprehensive as one volume can be, rings with the urgent message that this can be merely the beginning of reflection, analysis, and dialogue on the subject—not the end.

Intellectually challenging but very readable, this examination of the most troubling European turmoil of the last decade is highly recommended for both personal use and professional reference.

Pub Date: July 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-8028-3889-8

Page Count: 473

Publisher: Eerdmans

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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