This searing exposé on war’s remnants convincingly makes the case that gender inequality may be one of the greatest threats...
A gripping, ground-floor look at the lingering ravages of conflict in some of the deadliest contemporary war zones.
Photographer and activist Jones (Kabul in Winter, 2007, etc.), an award-winning authority on domestic violence, turns her journalistic sights on women in areas where war and its grim aftermath have significantly altered their lives. The author recounts her experiences from 2007 to 2009 while volunteering with the International Rescue Committee in Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Congo, as well as in Burmese refugee camps in Thailand and with Iraqi refugees scattered throughout Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. The IRC’s basic project was to enable women in these troubled areas to “examine their problems and present suggestions to improve their lives,” and they provided digital cameras to small groups of women, asking them to photograph some things they found pleasing, others they found problematic, and then gathered the women and other locals to exhibit and discuss the photos. It is difficult to choose the more powerful result: Jones’s intimate portrayal of disturbingly similar atrocities exposed in each region, or the self-awakening and solidarity the graphic recording of their living conditions occasioned in the photographers. For example, in the Congo, a renowned gynecologist reported surgically treating more than 10,000 rape victims from 2004 to 2008—“the oldest patient was eighty-three, the youngest nine months”; at the IRC women’s photo exhibition, one of the photographers explained why they had cloaked their subject in a sheet: “We covered her face because we did not want to show her identity—and she could be any one of us.” After describing the conundrum faced by Burmese refugees in Thai camps—“they can’t return to their own country, and they can’t enter this new one”—Jones wryly observes: “A photo is not always worth a thousand words. Sometimes you need the words to grasp the photo; without them, you would never know that the graceful lady with the rosy umbrella passing over the pretty river has no place to go.”
This searing exposé on war’s remnants convincingly makes the case that gender inequality may be one of the greatest threats to peace.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9111-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
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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