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
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
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
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