Smart and closely argued contrarianism, worthy of a Berrigan or Niebuhr. And don’t miss the bonus track: a learned, priestly...
Did Dubya know what mental associations he conjured up when, post–9/11, he promised to launch a crusade against terror? Maybe not. But Al Qaeda got the point—and so did the rest of the Muslim world.
Which is none to the good, writes former Catholic priest and current Boston Globe columnist Carroll (Constantine’s Sword, 2001, etc.). Evoking the Crusades of yore was a mistake, he argues at the outset. “My thoughts went to the elusive Osama bin Laden, how pleased he must have been, Bush already reading from his script,” Carroll writes, provocatively. And how so? For Bush, Carroll hazards, “crusade” was a casual, offhand reference, but for Muslims it would have called to mind hundreds of years of warfare with a millennial Christianity at whose head stood a savior whose cross had been beaten into a sword. Maybe not so offhand, then, for, Carroll writes, “George W. Bush, having cheerfully accepted responsibility for the executions of 152 death row inmates in Texas, had already shown himself to be entirely at home with divinely sanctioned violence.” At once theologian, philosopher, gadfly, and policy wonk, Carroll proceeds, in this collection of Globe commentaries, to poke and probe at the assumptions of the administration, which all seem to have a strange inevitability; after all, he notes, September 11, 1991, was the date on which Dubya’s father announced that a new world order had emerged from the ashes of the Soviet empire. Carroll thoughtfully examines the buildup to the Iraq conflict in the light of Vietnam, a war in which his father prominently served, and he champions in its stead a humane internationalism: “Because a unilateral war formed the core of America’s response to 9/11, the greatest moral shift to have occurred among nations in the twentieth century—the fragile but precious idea of institutionalized international mutuality—has been undercut.”
Smart and closely argued contrarianism, worthy of a Berrigan or Niebuhr. And don’t miss the bonus track: a learned, priestly scourging of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, “a triumph of sadomasochistic exploitation.”Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-7703-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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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