A unique travelogue boosted by wonderfully creative thinking with a political slant.
A celebrated poet, essayist and newly appointed (by President Obama) member of the National Council on the Humanities eloquently considers the global impact of our “Age of Terror.”
Merrill’s (Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, 2005, etc.) treatise explores the nature of terror, its place in the post-9/11 world and how it unites and galvanizes those in the throes of it. His trio of meditative essays is derived from exotic journeys to Malaysia, China and the Dead Sea, as well as from a panoramic view of war-torn Syria atop the plateau of the Golan Heights while pondering “the consequences of living in fear." The setting for his first essay is the muggy jungles of Kelantan in Malaysia, where Merrill observed the performance of a now-forbidden spirit-raising healing ritual presided over by a shaman to rid a village girl of her maladies. Seated with a tour guide on a wooden plank just beyond the stage, he takes stock of the state of faith, the nation and the aftermath of the turmoil of 9/11. A wandering expedition partially retracing the Beijing sojourn 19th-century poet-diplomat Saint-John Perse finds Merrill transfixed by Chinese history; he recounts a visit to a Zen Buddhist poet in Maui where he pensively tapped into the nature of human suffering after a week-long bout of stomach flu. The final section details the writer’s adventures visiting the Middle East’s Levant territory, where the American military occupation of Iraq still evokes local scorn. The author’s poetic background is evident in many lushly descriptive passages, and he clearly, rationally articulates his astute worldview. The essays can be hyperactively circuitous, however, with frequent digressions into the allegorical and the anecdotal. Terror, Merrill posits, is a fact of life, and his philosophically acute amalgam of religious, historical and political reflections will surely incite discussion and lively debate.
A unique travelogue boosted by wonderfully creative thinking with a political slant.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-57131-305-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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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