An excellent resource on terrorism for professionals and lay readers alike.
A scholarly but accessible analysis of young terrorists that draws on behavioral and social science.
In this book, LoCicero (Creating Young Martyrs, 2008) explores the complex interplay of personal and cultural factors that produces terrorists. She particularly focuses on the two men who were accused of carrying out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing while also surveying the spectrum of youth violence in America. Along the way, she blends in her own perspective on the attack, which was in her hometown, with her experience as a clinical psychologist studying traumatized youth worldwide. The title reflects the dissonance between Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s alleged deeds and the seemingly “normal American kids” that their friends, teachers and neighbors thought they knew. LoCicero convincingly shows that the brothers fit a pattern of young immigrants caught between conflicting identities and loyalties who become susceptible to extremism after personal crises, parental loss or neglect, drug abuse or financial setbacks. She devotes an entire chapter to how terrorist organizations recruit such people, arguing that behind every child soldier or young terrorist, there’s an adult recruiter who profits. Her prescription for preventing terrorism is to short-circuit such recruitment—first, by improving dialogue and engagement with young people, and second, by reducing the social injustice and conflicts worldwide that breed grievances. Hard-liners may equate trying to understand terrorists with excusing their actions, but the author reasons that simply labeling them evil or insane, and relying on incarceration or assassination, does little to prevent future acts. LoCicero often makes her case with great clarity and precision. Sometimes, however, there’s needless repetition; for example, she reminds readers eight times that the boat on which Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was caught was docked in Watertown, Massachusetts. On the other hand, she also constructs her arguments in ways that any layman can understand. The superbly researched, clearly cited book provides a wealth of resources for further reading. LoCicero’s stated goal for her book is “to reduce terrorism and reduce prejudice against foreign-born, young Americans, simultaneously.” That’s a tall order, perhaps beyond the reach of a single work, but she has made a significant contribution to the cause.
An excellent resource on terrorism for professionals and lay readers alike.Pub Date: July 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1440831881
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Praeger
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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