These radical, powerful broadsides, written in the white heat of anger, leave little doubt that this celebrated novelist...
Booker winner Roy (The Shape of the Beast: Conversations with Arundhati Roy, 2008, etc.) wields a potent pen in this collection of political essays, written between 2002 and 2008.
The author argues that religious fanaticism and rapacious development now threaten the future of India’s parliamentary democracy. “Fascism’s firm footprint has appeared in India,” she writes, noting that the country’s much-vaunted economic progress has dispossessed and displaced millions of people—through mining, dams and other projects—while a Hindu majority government persecutes and marginalizes Muslims and other minorities. Delving underneath the successes of the Indian economy that nationalist politicians call “India Shining,” Roy raises serious questions about government behaviors in many recent controversies. In several pieces on the 2001 terrorist attack on the Indian parliament building, she calls for a government inquiry into the alleged police torturing of Mohammed Afzal, a Kashmiri who confessed to leading the attack and remains on death row. In “Democracy: Who’s She When She’s at Home?”, Roy accuses the Hindu-nationalist government in Gujarat of complicity in a 2002 massacre of 2,000 Muslims in supposed retaliation for the burning of a railway coach in which 58 Hindu pilgrims were killed. Other pieces protest “world nightmare incarnate” George W. Bush’s 2006 visit to Gandhi’s memorial in Rajghat; the use of antiterrorist laws to harass critics and protesters, most often poor or Muslim people, who are imprisoned without bail to await closed court proceedings; and the propensity of governments, in India and elsewhere, to deny genocides. Throughout, Roy seeks to tear down the upbeat image of emerging India—“The singing-dancing world of Bollywood’s permanent pelvic thrusts, of permanently privileged, permanently happy Indians waving the tricolor flag and Feeling Good”)—and she reveals a nation that treats many of its ordinary citizens with callousness and brutality. The author proves to be an artful and blistering polemicist fervently committed to the Indian masses.
These radical, powerful broadsides, written in the white heat of anger, leave little doubt that this celebrated novelist intends to continue her role as India’s fiercest agitator.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60846-024-3
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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