A thoughtful book that encourages dialogue between young people on both sides of the issue.
Can the rising generations overcome their parents’ prejudices and bring peace to Israel and Palestine?
It’s not out of the question, writes journalist Miller, a veteran of the Seeds of Peace program in which Israeli, Palestinian and Egyptian youth come together at a Maine summer camp. Miller, who witnessed the signing of the Oslo Treaty, in which her father, a U.S. State Department negotiator, played a role, says of her family legacy: “The joke among my friends is that Middle East peace is the Miller family business.” To judge by this account, the family business is in very good hands indeed, for Miller is an admirably evenhanded chronicler of events that she goes on to witness in Israel and Palestine. She is blessed with a sense of irony, too; one of the places in which Palestinians air their aspirations is an American fast-food restaurant in Ramallah, “happily munching their hamburgers” even as the more militant of the youngsters insist that women are not capable of holding power, let alone driving a car. The Arab community has much to aspire to, Miller writes, for it is truly oppressed; yet, she adds, “It is difficult to determine how much of the Arab community’s second-class status is due to its internal conflicts and corruption and how much is due to governmental discrimination.” Corruption is all around, as are evidences of that discrimination; when Jewish Israelis protest, for one, the cops don’t shoot them down, whereas, one policeman said, at Arab Israeli demonstrations the orders are “shoot to hit.” Miller’s Israeli subjects aspire to peace, too, but must wrestle with the dilemma one of them poses: If the Palestinians are enfranchised, Israel may disappear; therefore, there is no hope of a united, bi-national state, hard though that may be for proponents of a Greater Israel to accept.
A thoughtful book that encourages dialogue between young people on both sides of the issue.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2005
ISBN: 0-345-46924-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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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