Keep a tumbler full of salt grains close at hand when reading this. But don’t be quick to dismiss this oddly entertaining...
Assassinations are rarely solo affairs carried out by delusional or psychopathic individuals, writes BBC producer Belfield. And if someone tells you that a particular assassination is the work of a crazy, well, he cautions, never assume that things are as they seem.
Take the sad matter of Princess Diana, dead eight years now. An innocent victim, no? Surely she died by the bad luck of being in a car with a drunk driver? Perhaps not, Belfield tantalizingly offers: that official story “is the only scenario for which there is no credible evidence,” whereas that mysterious motorcycle in the tunnel begins to look awfully suspicious. Or take the death of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995: by Belfield’s account, the official explanation that he was killed by lone gunman Yigal Amir does not square with the forensics, which points to the involvement of Israeli intelligence agents. Not only that, Belfield writes, but Amir “was a prominent member of Eyal, a far-right militant Zionist organization, run by a long-term Shabak agent and agent provocateur.” And then there was the whole Libyan hit team in America scenario, the brainchild of some Reagan administration official—except now, a quarter-century later, Libyan agents are our buddies, and they’ve been merrily killing al-Qaeda operatives so American hands don’t have to be dirtied. It’s all enough to give a phone-company-killed-JFK conspiratorialist nightmares and an Occam’s razor literalist pause, but Belfield has some useful documents on hand, not least of them a CIA manual that assures its readers that assassinations, though not for the squeamish, are nothing to be ashamed of. Not that the CIA had a great record of assassination. But then, Belfield shows, neither did the KGB, which succeeded only rarely in doing in its targets, and then mostly by the least cloak-and-daggerish methods. Still, Stalin’s death in 1953 was awfully suspicious. . . .
Keep a tumbler full of salt grains close at hand when reading this. But don’t be quick to dismiss this oddly entertaining éxpose, given how the world just gets stranger and stranger.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1343-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
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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