A missed opportunity.
ABC News senior foreign news correspondent Sciutto considers Muslim anger at America and offers muddled reflections.
That the United States suffers from a toxic reputation among many Muslims, especially since the Iraq war and occupation, should surprise no one. The author, who began covering the Middle East only after 9/11, finds that anti-American feeling is disturbingly mainstream and takes the problem personally. Calling it “demoralizing,” Sciutto admits, “the truth is that the hatred insults me. It may be an inherently American quality to believe our own hype, but I do.” Despite this self-limiting premise, the book pursues the roots of the hatred and makes familiar indictments of the Bush administration’s support for dictators, its diplomacy tailored to oil interests and its sanction of torture. Fresh insights and forward-looking prescriptions, however, are in scant supply. Sciutto does successfully explore an essential contradiction: Many Muslims view America as omnipotent, an ideal of sorts, but also as untrustworthy and disappointing, and that paradox breeds conspiracy theories. Looking at post-Iraq war security, reconstruction and political failures, they can’t believe America could be so incompetent, concluding that it’s all intentional. Well-cast thumbnail sketches of a “reformed” Saudi jihadist, an underground Iranian blogger, a disillusioned Iraqi trauma surgeon and an Afghan schoolgirl, among others, effectively humanize the problem. But profiling nine countries, Sciutto seems fully at ease in none. He clings to too few characters and renders their stories too thin. In the chapter on Lebanon, for example, his portrait of a 24-year-old Christian uncharacteristically sympathetic to Hezbollah overwhelms the narrative and gives a distorted picture of the nation’s intricate politics. When Sciutto was the only reporter embedded with U.S. Special Forces during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a prescient Green Beret predicted, “Today they’re giving us the thumbs-up. Tomorrow they’ll be giving us the finger.” Five years later, this book gives disappointingly short shrift to the events and attitudes that forged the crucible of U.S.-Muslim dissonance.
A missed opportunity.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-40688-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2008
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
PERSPECTIVES
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