“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
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
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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