An intriguing journalistic memoir built around a lucid, alarming overview of where the Middle East has been and where it is...
A deft personal account of a career spent reporting from the Middle East, witnessing the evaporation of peace and stability.
NBC chief foreign correspondent Engel (War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq, 2008, etc.) takes a confident, thorough approach to this fusion of memoir and journalistic narrative, beginning with evolutionary overviews of both Islam and the modern Middle East. Looking back, he concludes that his own youthful, improvisational journalistic beginnings in Egypt in 1997 coincided with the impending downfall of dictators like Saddam Hussein. “Saddam was the first of the Arab big men to go,” he writes. In cleanly structured chapters, the author explores his reporting during particular flash points, beginning with ominous early examples of fundamentalist terrorism, through the Syrian war and the spread of the Islamic State group, illustrating a harsh thesis of entropy fueled by successive American administrations: “Bush’s aggressive interventionism and Obama’s timidity and inconsistency completely destroyed the status quo.” Engel’s personalized viewpoint supports this claim, presenting a coherent episodic narrative alongside his own high-risk career. He was offered a position as Palestinian-affairs correspondent for a French press agency in time to witness the violent Second Intifada. From there, he often wound up in harm’s way, as when he found himself the last American correspondent in Baghdad at the outset of the second Iraq War, leading to employment as a foreign correspondent for ABC. The depth of Engel’s experience is clear, yet his boldness may have led to an overconfidence that contributed to his 2012 kidnapping in Syria. “Those [experiences] gave me a false sense of security, and I guess I got greedy,” he writes. “In journalism, you never want to get greedy.” Engel seems capable and likably frank, in contrast to his pessimistic conclusions: “A lot of killing remains to be done before leaders of stature emerge—and before the fires of chaos are tamped down once again.”
An intriguing journalistic memoir built around a lucid, alarming overview of where the Middle East has been and where it is heading.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4516-3511-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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