Having written magazine articles on subjects like the buccaneer business model of Somali pirates and the dark side of overseas adoptions, Wired contributing editor Carney expands on time spent in India, Europe and America examining the illegal “red” marketplace for trafficked human body parts.
The author writes that “our appetite for human flesh is higher now than at any other time in history.” Though the trade may appear barbaric, it is commonplace in places like Egypt and the Philippines, and most transactions are handled—to an outsider, at least—altruistically. As a post-graduate anthropology student, the author taught for many years in southern India, and his unsympathetic initiation into the “body business” came at the expense of a young American student and suicide victim upon whose increasingly perishable corpse descended a variety of locals who insinuated “demands on what was left of her material self.” Elsewhere in India, Carney reports dramatic stories of a riverbank “bone factory” where 100 confiscated, grave-robbed human skulls might net $70,000 overseas, the atrocious for-profit kidnapping of children from city streets and orphanages and the contract-bound surrogate baby factories in Akanksha. A chapter on the latest advancements in the lucrative international brokers’ market for living-donor kidneys is as startling as one on genetic egg harvesting—in exchange for sperm, Swiss fertility specialists can “basically FedEx you a baby.” Less dour is the author’s affably detailed stint “guinea-pigging” for a clinical trial of a “rebranded Viagra” and selling his hair for auction. As Carney highlights the most egregious of criminal red markets hoping to expose and recriminalize them, he impartially balances that perspective with arguments for industry legalization and demystifies its seductive “free market solution.” Much akin to the work of Mary Roach, the result is a volume that lays bare the atrocities of the human flesh trade, reiterating the verity that “every corpse has a stakeholder.”
Pub Date: June 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-193646-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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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