A bone-chilling takedown of America’s misguided use of soft power.
A young Afghan American finds life in a remote Afghan village to be very different from the narrative she had been fed back home in this novel from a former New York Times Afghanistan correspondent.
Given that the U.S. has been keen to win the battle for hearts and minds in Afghanistan since 9/11, Americans will willingly lap up any story that sheds the U.S.–Afghanistan relationship in a positive light. Dr. Gideon Crane’s wildly successful memoir, Mother Afghanistan, fits the bill. The (fictional) bestseller narrates the tale of Crane’s efforts to do good in a poverty-stricken village. Crane’s best intentions didn’t amount to much as he helplessly watched Fereshta, a young mother, die from complications in childbirth. In a sweeping gesture of goodwill, years later, Crane built a hospital in the village in her honor, a monument that drew thousands of donations from well-meaning Americans trying to justify their country’s actions. Parveen Shamsa, a newly minted college graduate, is drawn in by Crane’s account and travels to the same village to exercise her medical anthropological skills and connect with her Afghan roots. To her dismay, Parveen finds gaping holes in Crane’s narrative and slowly realizes that “the village was a backdrop against which Americans played out their fantasies of benevolence or self-transformation or, more recently, control.” Worse, Crane’s memoir also galvanizes the U.S. Army to deliver its own brand of feel-good medicine to the town, with unsurprisingly tragic consequences. Through a kaleidoscope of shifting perspectives—from Parveen's host family to the village elderman, the gynecologist who can only visit weekly, and the military top brass who bring the war to town—Waldman (The Submission, 2011) delivers a breathtaking and achingly nuanced examination of the grays in a landscape where black and white answers have long been the only currency.
A bone-chilling takedown of America’s misguided use of soft power.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-45157-4
Page Count: 397
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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