A sympathetic view of Palestinians not to be mistaken for objective reporting.
An oral history of life in Gaza and the West Bank, obtained through interviews conducted over a period of nearly four years, lets a diversity of Palestinians speak their minds about their situations.
Hoke (English/Bethlehem Univ.) and Malek are journalists with Voice of Witness, a nonprofit organization dedicated to examining human crises around the world. With the aid of translators and transcribers, they recorded the voices of 50 interviewees and then edited the transcripts for clarity. Of the 16 people selected to tell their stories here, only two are Israelis, for the object is not to provide balance but to illustrate what life is like for Palestinians. Male and female, young and middle-aged, educated or not, mostly but not all middle class, these Palestinians narrate their experiences growing up and living next to Israelis or in areas where Israel controls major aspects of their lives. Some took part in the Intifadas, some spent time in prison, and some lived for years outside Palestine and then chose to move there. Some are resigned to the restrictions of their lives, while some are hopeful of a brighter future. About 50 pages of appendices give context to their personal stories. The first, “Timeline of Modern Palestine,” opens with the date 8000 B.C. and ends with 2014 but has no mention of the events of that explosive summer. Appendix III is an essay on Palestine and international law by Allegra Pacheco, the wife of one of the Palestinian interviewees, and Appendix IV is a piece by journalist Nicolas Pelham on the Gaza tunnels that focuses on their economic importance to Hamas. The oral histories that make up the bulk of the book paint a harsh picture of Israeli restrictions on the lives of Palestinians; however, failure of the lengthy appendices to discuss the necessity for such restriction—suicide bombers, rocket attacks, Hamas’ stated goal of the destruction of Israel—is a serious flaw.
A sympathetic view of Palestinians not to be mistaken for objective reporting.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1940450247
Page Count: 320
Publisher: McSweeney's/Voice of Witness
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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