A timely, systematic breakdown of thee reasons for radicalization.
A French scholar delineates the attractions of violent extremism, specifically jihadi Islam.
In this concise translation from the French, Khosrokhavar (Director of Studies/School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris) moves from general notions of radicalization, which have historically involved pockets of marginalized and ghettoized minorities from the 11th-century Assassins to the Europeans terrorists in the “years of lead,” to the specific current ideological radicalism in the Muslim world. What has changed? The author emphasizes that this newest crop of radicals involves a phenomenon that is “more intense” than previous eras: larger in scope, more widespread, enduring over a longer period of time, and involving more random violence and a troubling “capacity to adapt to extreme situations through reorganization”—e.g., the adaptability of al-Qaida. Khosrokhavar finds that radicalization takes different paths in the Muslim world and in the European theater. In the former, the radicals tend to be young people from the middle classes who feel disenfranchised against corrupt and authoritative regimes and are bent on establishing “a transnational Islamic regime.” In the latter, young radicals emerge from the lower social strata in tough neighborhoods and are often children of immigrants, such as the young people of North African descent in France. The author looks at the small but growing numbers of women joining radical jihadism, often acting to avenge the death of a husband, brother, or father or acting out (in a severely repressed Muslim society) from an “antipatriarchal, even feminist dimension.” Living in France, Khosrokhavar is particularly attuned to the radicalization that occurs among the young immigrants living in the banlieues of Lyon and elsewhere, fraught by ghetto conditions and “intense dehumanization,” and he offers insight into the radicalization that occurs in prisons, when vulnerable criminals are converted by a charismatic “radicalizer.”
A timely, systematic breakdown of thee reasons for radicalization.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62097-268-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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
SEEN & HEARD
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