by Åsne Seierstad & translated by Ingrid Christophersen ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2005
Dispatches scorched by the flames of battle and delivered by Seierstad, to enormous effect, in tense, crisp language.
A riveting and wrenching account of a Norwegian journalist’s experiences in Baghdad before, during and after the American invasion of Iraq.
Seierstad (The Bookseller of Kabul, 2003) establishes a principle that dominates this powerful work: “The truth about the war in Iraq does not exist.” Everyone lies. The Iraqi bureaucrats lie as the Americans prepare and launch their attacks; the Iraqi media broadcast and print stories that are patently false; the Americans lie about their objectives in the country. (The author reports many American soldiers saying the invasion is payback for 9/11.) Seierstad begins with her difficulties in Baghdad before the regime fell. She didn’t speak the language; couldn’t go anywhere without a “minder”; and repeatedly struggled to convince officials to let her remain. (Once, she was evicted but soon found her way back from Jordan.) But then she discovered a wonderful translator and guide, Aliya, who stayed with her until she left the country after the fall of Baghdad. When order disintegrated as the Americans approached, the author was able to get the stories she craved through interviews with ordinary Iraqis and visits to sites of damage and destruction—hospitals, marketplaces, schools—writing descriptions of what she saw that can require of the reader a steady eye and a calm stomach. Seierstad reproduces here, within the context of her narrative, a number of the actual stories she filed. Horrors were everywhere. American soldiers, she claims, targeted journalists and, unable to distinguish friend from foe, shot numerous civilians whose only offense was to fail to understand English. In Saddam City, later, she heard harrowing tales of families that had been decimated by the dictator’s brutality. Looters now ran wild while Americans guarded the Oil Ministry.
Dispatches scorched by the flames of battle and delivered by Seierstad, to enormous effect, in tense, crisp language.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-465-07600-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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by Åsne Seierstad ; translated by Seán Kinsella
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by Åsne Seierstad & translated by Nadia Christensen
by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979
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
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by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales
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by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez
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by Howard Zinn
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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