Though sometimes a chore to read, Nadeau’s book makes for a useful work of advocacy, calling attention to a terrible traffic...
Journalistic account of the sex trade that runs from the west coast of Africa to the southern coast of Italy and beyond.
American journalist Nadeau, author of an earlier account of the Italian trial of American murder suspect Amanda Knox (Angel Face, 2010), turns her attention to the Camorra, or Calabrian Mafia, and their engagements with the drug and arms trades, which in turn net them human cargo: young women from Nigeria and other African countries, recruited at home and promised livelihoods in Europe, then smuggled into Italy on overcrowded, easily shipwrecked boats. Reports Nadeau, “in 2016, eleven thousand Nigerian women and girls arrived in Italy on those boats.” There they were collected and put to work in the mob-controlled prostitution industry, with no way out. It does not help that Nigerian women can claim asylum easily by saying that they are threatened by Boko Haram, nor that the immigration authorities “may even know that [a woman] is being trafficked and forced to sell sex against her will, but they still look away.” Church-based and other nongovernmental agencies have stepped in but have been overwhelmed so that few women are intercepted as they land and can be guided into applying for safe asylum away from Camorra control. “They have to work fast,” writes the author, “because the traffickers are waiting in the refugee camps to ferry the girls to their madams, often within the first week of their arrival.” The book, built on interviews with many participants, is well-reported and consistently heartbreaking yet occasionally repetitive. Moreover, the author drops threads only to pick them up later, slowed by too much attention to minor detail (“Some men stop on motorcycles. The teenage boys who stop are invariably riding mopeds”).
Though sometimes a chore to read, Nadeau’s book makes for a useful work of advocacy, calling attention to a terrible traffic in human misery.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78607-255-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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
PERSPECTIVES
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