Of considerable interest to China watchers and human-rights activists.
Thoughtful reportage on the small campaigns of resistance to state rule that are springing up throughout China.
Huge portions of Beijing are now being scraped away, the 600-year-old terracotta-tile roofs and cobblestone streets replaced by glittering skyscrapers in the name of economic modernization. That is an offense to preservationists, one of whom observes that “Beijing’s value is as a whole. . . . It was like Jerusalem, a complete medieval city.” It is a worse offense to the thousands of Beijing residents displaced by urban renewal; their property has been condemned and declared almost worthless, then sold out from under them for the equivalent of millions of dollars—and by the government. The long-suffering Chinese people may have once put up with such fraud and theft, writes Wall Street Journal Berlin bureau chief Johnson. But in the wake of government efforts to modernize the state with “a legal system that can keep order nationwide,” which has led to an explosion of lawmaking, ordinary citizens are using the courts and other judicial channels to fight back—vigorously but mostly without success. Johnson profiles three cases: the efforts of activist Fang Ke to save old Beijing from a government “bent on destroying everything but a few small corners of the old town, turning them into tourist zones”; a small-scale farmers’ rebellion on the Loess Plateau, protesting oppressive taxes and the brutal tactics used to collect them; and—perhaps most interesting to Western readers—the Chinese government’s battle to declare the religious movement called Falun Gong a dangerous cult. (The author won a Pulitzer in 2001 for his reporting on Falun Gong.) Johnson’s defense of Falun Gong, which blends calisthenics and meditation to improve both health and moral righteousness, is compelling, his rejection of the government’s efforts to equate movement leader Master Li with Jim Jones well argued. “Fundamentally,” he writes, “what was often forgotten in the learned discourse was that the government, not Falun Gong, was killing people.”
Of considerable interest to China watchers and human-rights activists.Pub Date: March 23, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-42186-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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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