First-class reporting and storytelling add grace to a depressing tale—one that Bergner deserves praise for venturing to tell.
A remarkable journey into hell: a country where nothing works and murderers rule.
Novelist/journalist Bergner, whose God of the Rodeo (1998) was set in another hell—a maximum-security prison in Louisiana—here voyages to a country the UN has repeatedly deemed “the worst on earth”: Sierra Leone, in West Africa. Torn apart by a decade-long civil war uncommonly vicious even by the standards of a region where civil war and ethnic violence are endemic, Sierra Leone seems to many outside observers to be utterly unsalvageable. In this vivid narrative of travel and observation, Bergner gives only a few reasons to think that anything is better than that; as he wanders among terrorized, maimed villagers (a favorite tactic of rebels and government troops alike being to lop limbs off suspected enemies), doubtful aid workers, and vicious fighters such as one “young man with an AK-47 and a black cap and white drug-frothed saliva webbing the corners of his mouth,” he more than suggests that the situation is hopeless. There are many in his narrative who would argue otherwise, from homegrown politicians who believe that one day Sierra Leone will be a paradise to which “the rich will come, the poor will come, the middle class will come” to white mercenaries who love the entire business of war, such as one South African who crows, “It’s the biggest and best game in the history of mankind.” And then, of course, there are the missionaries, ever hopeful of recruiting souls in all the mess. While wondering whether his views are not freighted with prejudice as a white, Bergner delivers a memorable, scarifying portrait of a country in terminal turmoil—one whose leading citizens, he notes, pray will soon be recolonized by any power that can keep the peace.
First-class reporting and storytelling add grace to a depressing tale—one that Bergner deserves praise for venturing to tell.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-26653-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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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