A timely, engaging work that reveals why the journalist’s profession is so important and so endangered.
A collection of essays by dedicated journalists on the many hurdles they face as women in the field of Middle Eastern newsgathering—edited by Lebanese British journalist Hankir and introduced by CNN chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour.
In many cases, these conflict-zone reporters were inspired to become journalists due to heart-rending stories among their own families and friends. “To become a journalist in some of these places takes a special kind of courage for a woman,” writes Amanpour. “It can mean defying family and community, and it brings unique challenges and entails sacrifices specific to women.” These stories from the field are rare and remarkable, especially because the writers are “twice burdened,” according to Hankir: Not only do they hail from places that mistreat women worse than anywhere in the world; they are also “some of the most repressed reporters in the world.” The book is divided into five sections: “Remembrances,” “Crossfire,” “Resilience,” “Exile,” and “Transition.” In “The Woman Question,” Hannah Allam, covering the war in Iraq for McClatchy Newspapers, writes of the “unspoken understanding that if you delved too deeply into women’s lives, you risked being labeled as soft, or missing the point.” A Lebanese journalist covering the wars in the Middle East for American newspapers, Nada Bakri became deeply disenchanted with the profession after the death of her husband and son’s father, New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid, in Syria in 2012. Egyptian journalist Lina Attalah (“On a Belated Encounter With Gender”) recalls the 2011 Arab Spring activism in terms of responding to her father’s conflicted feelings about her being a journalist. Egyptian photojournalist Eman Helal writes of being routinely restricted from “hard news” assignments and then finding her story in the harassment of women protesters in Tahrir Square in Cairo in 2011. Others, such as photographer Amira Al-Sharif, who was born in Saudi Arabia but raised in Yemen, write that being women allowed them to cover stories that men could not.
A timely, engaging work that reveals why the journalist’s profession is so important and so endangered.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-14-313341-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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
PERSPECTIVES
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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