In lucid detail, Carter surveys the ills that thwart peace and suggests constructive ways to address them, opening with a moving account of his own role in the Camp David Accords, an agreement that was based on his thorough understanding of the antagonists' personalities and agendas. This isn't a mediation manual, though there's a chapter on mediation, but an exploration of causes, and cures for, conflict. In this time of "peace," internal strife abounds; Carter includes succinct descriptions of a sobering 41 such conflicts; 34 have resulted in at least 1,000 "battle-related deaths." He also discusses many other concerns with which the Carter Center, and he personally, are actively involved: food, shelter, health; the environment; human rights; free elections; inner-city strife; children's rights. Carter's humanitarian agenda is somewhat like a political platform; but the range and depth of his understanding of real problems and his courageous, persistent pursuit and achievement of at least partial reconciliation or improved conditions, often against enormous odds, are inspiring. Most impressive is his lack of egoism; Carter's goal is truly the betterment of humanity. It would have been nice if he'd given sources for more of his statistics ("One dollar spent on immunization saves ten dollars"); on the other hand, several useful documents are included (e.g., his personal letter to Begin inviting him to Camp David; the American Academy of Pediatrics' statement on youth and firearms). The book closes with feasible, effective ways young people can address the problems discussed—first: "find out more [in your] library." A must. (Nonfiction. 12+)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1993
ISBN: 014037440X
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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