A solid contribution to a rising genre: the noncombatant’s war memoir.
Tough travels in a religion-haunted, ruined land.
There are three phrases, writes Italian novelist and poet Albinati, that a humanitarian aid worker in Afghanistan needs to know how to say in both Dari and Pashto, the country’s major languages: “I am a good man. I work for the UN. Please do not kill me.” Not that Albinati, to judge by this journal of three months in the field in the spring and summer of 2002, is often in danger of being killed by an assailant close enough to speak to; mostly, whether tucked away in a crummy hotel room in Kabul or roaming from town to town in a UN truck, he’s imperiled by rockets and mortars fired from afar. He faces other dangers: the strong desire to take up smoking again after having quit a dozen years earlier, the temptation to drink too much scotch (“Three glasses is the right number, the perfect number to get rid of the day’s rage without ending up completely wrecked”). In between trying to suggest ways to impose order on chaos—Albinati allows that, if elected mayor of the bombed-out capital, the first thing he’d do “would be to give every street in Kabul a name and put up a sign, so that everyone would have an address, even the prefabs, the shanty towns, the muddy open spaces, the heaps of stones”—and conduct a census of the countryside (involving, among other things, counting sheep), Albinati marvels at the resilience of the Afghan people and their capacity to endure what would have broken just about any Westerner. Some of his journal entries are oddly mundane (as when he watches Disney’s Jungle Book, humming the Italian version of “The Bare Necessities” to himself), while others are thoughtful and moving, as when he writes of the lives of street children: “What they want more than anything else is to play.”
A solid contribution to a rising genre: the noncombatant’s war memoir.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2004
ISBN: 1-84391-904-4
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Hesperus/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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
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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