“Is it ethically defensible to focus on the lives of two girls when they have not granted their consent?” Seierstad wonders...
In which the sins of the children are visited upon the fathers: an unblinking journalistic account of the life of the jihadi.
“You did not suddenly wake up one day a fanatic,” writes Norwegian journalist Seierstad (One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway, 2015, etc.) toward the end of this insightful but somewhat overlong story of immigrant dreams betrayed. “It was a direction you grew in.” Sadiq had come to Norway with his wife from Somalia and there, by hard work and no small travail, had raised two daughters and a son. In late adolescence, having slipped into a gradual fundamentalist outlook, the two daughters vanished only to announce, both defiantly and apologetically, that they were off to battle the infidels on the battlefields of Syria. Their journey led them into a hornet’s nest of Islamic State terrorists from every corner of the Muslim world arrayed against a Russian-backed dictatorship; there they plunged ever further into the violent jihadi cause. As the daughters, never quite silent or out of sight, became more religious, the son became more militant in rejecting Islam; part of the value of Seierstad’s informative account is to witness the back-and-forth emails among them: “God…is such a self-obsessed asshole that he wants the people he ‘created’ to pray to him five times a day and for those who don’t believe in him to be killed,” writes the son, to which the daughter replies, “instead of talking crap and being offensive try finding the truth or shut up and respect other people’s choices.” Meanwhile, even as his family was falling apart, Sadiq tried to remove his daughters from Syria—no easy matter when they didn’t want to leave, standing by their choice to submit to IS.
“Is it ethically defensible to focus on the lives of two girls when they have not granted their consent?” Seierstad wonders at the end. That is for readers to decide, now knowing much more about what drives people to fanatical causes.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-27967-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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