An evocative, well-researched, and convincing case for global bilingualism.
Retired judge Blair’s latest geopolitical treatise makes the case for bilingualism as a vital component of humanity’s future.
Blair has published multiple books and essays since 2012, centered on 21st-century geopolitics, global warming, and the necessity of collective global action toward creating a more equitable world. Here, the author argues that two-mother-tongue bilingualism (abbreviated throughout the book as “2 MT bilingualism”) is essential for achieving peaceable global unity: This form of language learning essentially involves children learning two languages simultaneously from a young age. As per the book’s ambitious recommendations, the United Nations’ “first step” in preparing for the future should be “the establishment of a global community of communication with a language rationalization policy of 2 MT Bilingualism.” Such a plan would bring a “psychological and emotional lift” to billions of marginalized people around the world who do not speak the 20 most popular languages and have been excluded from the global exchange of ideas and resources. “Smaller political entities,” the book argues, would have a greater stake in sharing “international agency” with dominant “empire-states” and would be better equipped to join the fight against climate change and other potential global catastrophes that would disproportionately impact poorer nations. Blair makes a convincing case that empowering the United Nations through 2 MT bilingualism would not create a one-world government “Leviathan” (as predicted by anti-globalists) but would instead lead to a more democratic world order. The author asserts that while past efforts to achieve a global language (most notably the creation of Esperanto in the late 19th century) have prioritized Western languages, the emphasis on 2 MT bilingualism is sensitive to the post-colonial demand for preservation of “smaller language communities.” The author’s plea for bilingualism is particularly sympathetic to famed Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe’s critique of imposed colonial languages and explores case studies from Tanzania and Indonesia on finding “an indigenous alternative to linguistic congruence with a European language.”
Blair argues that it was former European colonies after World War II who first rejected the Western idea of monolingual congruence as a necessity for nation-states and provided the foundations for “a new language rationalization policy for the 21st Century.” Blair’s book also effectively dismantles some prevailing linguistic myths in the West: namely the perceived national importance of monolingualism and the idea that English is the forerunner in the race toward a global language. And while admitting that “global linguistic congruence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the resolution of our current problems,” Blair may still be overselling the democratizing effects of bilingualism. Despite the author’s own occasional linguistic eccentricities, the book is nevertheless compelling in its philosophy and thoroughly researched: In its 138 pages, Blair marshals more than 100 footnotes from scholarly sources to back its claims and utilizes many visual aids. And although the book is certainly serious in intention, it also incorporates snippets of playful linguistic humor: When discussing anachronistic gendered grammars, for instance, the book highlights logical inconsistencies, such as the French word for beard (la barbe) being feminine, while a woman’s breast (le sein) is masculine. Nevertheless, the book’s emphasis on a bilingual system that would benefit poor countries offers a potential solution to a myriad of global linguistic issues.
An evocative, well-researched, and convincing case for global bilingualism.Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2022
ISBN: 9798371525024
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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