An earnest and valuable jeremiad insisting, reasonably, that ethical behavior is imperative when parsing the nearly...
Firsthand accounts from the occupied West Bank.
Shulman (Humanistic Studies/Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem; Tamil: A Biography, 2016, etc.)—a MacArthur fellow, winner of the Israel Prize, former Israeli Defense Force officer, and an active grass-roots peace activist—presents his impassioned report on the nonviolent Israeli-Palestinian joint efforts to stop the settlements in the West Bank. In Hebron, there is the tomb of the scriptural patriarchs, a burial place, according to the Bible, purchased by Abraham. Not far are the South Hebron Hills, where Jews and Palestinians claim the same land. In this collection of artful yet often passionately angry essays, the author writes about malevolent settlers, aided by their government, who steal the land from peaceful shepherds and farmers. Roads are blocked, and wells are declared off-limits. Shulman recalls countless confrontations of unreasonable, brutal soldiers with confused, frightened residents. Settlers, he tells us, assault the native population. Representatives of the peace movements, like the author, intervene when they can, courting arrest as they try to shame and reason with adamant authority. Resistance in the beautiful Judean Mountains can be surreal and scary. Shulman bears witness to the wickedness he sees in the Israeli settlers, police, bureaucrats, soldiers, judges, security guards, and the willfully passive. (He does not discuss the Palestinian Authority in the area). In his meditations on freedom, truth, and resistance he recruits the likes of Marcus Aurelius, Spinoza, and Socrates, and he offers aphorisms such as, “freedom eludes the person who pursues it deliberately.” Regarding truth, Shulman argues that there are forms “that are not relevant to this discussion—factual truth, for example, which generally tends to the disastrous.” He prefers “ethical truths.” As the author proudly asserts his humble efforts to do good, he concludes, “Israelis need to be liberated from the Occupation no less than the Palestinians need to become free.”
An earnest and valuable jeremiad insisting, reasonably, that ethical behavior is imperative when parsing the nearly impossible Israeli-Palestinian conundrum.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-226-56665-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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