Grim indeed and sometimes gruesome—and a brave work of investigation.
A firsthand look at the terror of war as visited on noncombatants exposed to American fire.
Civilians are always hurt and killed in war, collectively deemed “collateral damage” with all due regret. As McDonell (The Civilization of Perpetual Movement: Nomads in the Modern World, 2016, etc.) writes, in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and other American theaters of operation, many of them have become “excess mortality,” a grim and Orwellian term that would seem to mean those killed beyond the actuarial numbers that enter into the calculus of “acceptable” death: If a sniper is on a roof and 100 civilians are slated to die in the bombardment required to eliminate that threat, then the 101st gets a whole new category. By any measure, according to a well-quoted epidemiological study, “at least 650,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the first three years of the war”—a figure, notes the author, that George W. Bush dismissed, saying that it was “only” 30,000. As to numbers, McDonell—who began his career as a teenager as the author of an undercooked but popular coming-of-age novel but hardened up as a roving journalist—does the math to show “information about innocent death in foreign wars is most accessible to America’s cosmopolitan wealthy, even though it’s mostly the working classes, domestically and abroad, who become casualties.” The statistics he turns up, working at the fringes of classified military information, are ugly, and they tell stories that speak to those working-class experiences—a pair of young Iraqis, for instance, who, braving fire to recover the body of a relative, court death by Iraqi or American fire, a choice that “is not their own, precisely.” The author concludes, with righteous anger, that “killing innocent people to increase our own security is cowardly.” That it also seems to be accepted military doctrine puts the lie to any notion of moral superiority that we might bring to the enterprise.
Grim indeed and sometimes gruesome—and a brave work of investigation.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1157-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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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