Moving tales of ordinary people navigating an unimaginable degree of violence and strife.
A journalist who has spent significant time in Karachi fashions a series of narrative portraits of the city’s beleaguered denizens, suffering “one of the worst outbreaks of violence” since the 1990s.
A coastal city bloated by migration since Partition in 1947, Karachi was the first capital of Pakistan, until 1967, and it remains the economic heart of the country. In these affecting portraits of five Karachiites trying to make a living in the dense, teeming metropolis, New Humanist editor Shackle—whose family emigrated from Pakistan to the U.K. in the 1970s before she was born—reveals the struggles of the countless disparate groups competing for physical space, jobs, and basic services like health care and sanitation as violent Mafia groups step in to fill the void left by a largely military government. Safdar, a young Pashtun who “emanates an electric energy,” is determined to become an ambulance driver after a childhood in which he helped take care of his polio-stricken brother. The job is one of the most dangerous in the city, taking him to retrieve corpses left by rival gangs. But he perseveres in order to help his fellow citizens, even thinking that he must eschew marriage because of the danger. Parveen, a young teacher in the “street schools” of Lyari, tries desperately to keep her vulnerable staff and pupils from joining the neighborhood gangs, at her own peril. Jannat, who lives in an isolated village just outside of the city, managed to complete school beyond the fifth grade, the first in the village to do so, but her prospects for personal advancement were thwarted by early marriage and children. In addition to the eye-opening personal stories, Shackle weaves in Pakistani history, including the rise of the Taliban and the dizzying array of political parties, riots, natural disasters, and sectarian violence that have plagued the city for more than a decade. The author also includes a timeline (1992-2018) and a list of relevant political groups.
Moving tales of ordinary people navigating an unimaginable degree of violence and strife.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-61219-942-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
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