An English Pen Award winner, this anthology forms a rich, creatively diverse motif sublimely representative of a country and...
An emancipating exhibition from uprising artisans of Syria.
Assessing the value of art and culture in Western Asia amid “such untold bloodshed,” editors and Syrian journalists Halasa, Omareen and Mahfoud collect striking works of literary, photographic and hand-drawn self-expression from more than 50 talented, passionate contributors, both new and established. The opening photomontage honors victims of the 1982 Hama massacre and is followed by Samar Yazbek’s searingly haunting journey through northern Syria, a devastated countryside “made of earth, blood, and fire, where explosions never ceased.” Animator Sulafa Hijazi’s brutally explicit “cycle of violence” artwork represents her history living in violent, revolutionary-era Syria, as do defected illustrator Khalil Younes’ ink-on-paper creations. The written compositions are permeated with violence, bloodshed and familial sorrow, but also hope and resilience within a culture struggling to regain some semblance of citizenship. Amassed here is a dramatic tapestry of poster art, cartoons, inspired poetry, digital and cellphone video stills of bombed neighborhoods riskily posted to social media, and the anonymously produced finger-puppet play series “Top Goon.” Syrian artistic culture has emerged as the ultimate weapon against the country’s despotism, but these works also reflect a complicated revolution with fatal consequences: Graffitists like those featured in the book can be killed if caught stenciling city walls with radical countergovernmental street art—though they have devised a “secret toolkit for spray-painting quickly and surreptitiously.” Unfurling from the formerly closed fist of tyrannical oppression, these pieces are emblematic of a repressed culture’s innovative activism, courageously echoing the editors’ belief that “creativity is not only a way of surviving the violence, but of challenging it.”
An English Pen Award winner, this anthology forms a rich, creatively diverse motif sublimely representative of a country and its people awash in strife and insurgency.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-86356-787-2
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Saqi Books
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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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