An eye-opening document and an urgent call for accountability.
An edited and annotated version of the controversial United Nations investigation into the recent Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip and reactions by mostly pro-Palestinian observers.
The result of a fact-finding mission commissioned by the UN and led by South African Justice Richard Goldstone to investigate potential war crimes committed by Israel during its Gaza attack in January 2009, the report has been heavily edited by American journalists Horowitz, Ratner and Weiss, introduced by Desmond Tutu and Naomi Klein, and is followed by 11 essays “that capture its ongoing impact.” The Israeli government refused to cooperate—despite the report’s finding that Hamas and the Palestinian Authority were complicit in crimes—and there is essentially one essay in Israel’s defense, by Moshe Halbertal, who condemns the report as “biased and unfair” while urging Israel to respond to the allegations. The report is hard-hitting and grim, exposing for the world the horrendous conditions wrought by the years of Israeli occupation. Following three years of blockade of an already weakened Gaza and responding to suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism inflicted on southern Israel, the Israeli Defense Force swiftly moved into Gaza in late 2008 and deliberately destroyed houses, industry and agricultural land. At least 1,400 Palestinians were killed, approximately 900 of which were civilians, 300 children and 100 women. The report asserts that Israel’s military operations were “designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity…[and] force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.” The report also addresses the deliberate attacks against the civilian population, the use of Palestinians as “human shields,” internal violence by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority and the suppression of dissent in Israel. Subsequently, the commentators—including Rashid Khalidi, Raji Sourani, Jerome Slater and Henry Siegman—discuss the report’s acknowledgement of the “prolonged state of impunity” by Israel and the implications for international law, while Brian Baird recounts the systematic condemnation of the report by the U.S. Congress.
An eye-opening document and an urgent call for accountability.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56858-641-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
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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