A valuable reminder of the value of fighting for peace.
A collection of in-depth interviews with peacemakers of all kinds.
“Peace mediation itself,” writes Jonathan Cohen, executive director of Conciliation Resources, “needs to evolve and demonstrate its contemporary relevance and effectiveness, amid rapid changes in how wars are fought and in the face of destabilised international security.” These modern challenges, and the various organizations dedicated to meeting them, are the focus of this assemblage of interviews with people working for peace in the world’s dozens of conflict zones. A common denominator, as professor Oliver Richmond writes in his foreword, is an approach to peacemaking that transcends “old boundaries of thought and practice” in attempts to “bridge both distant scholarship and the polemics of politics.” In these interviews, serious and probing questions are put to people in peacemaking roles, and their answers speak more directly to those polemics than any standard narrative could convey. Mohammad Latif Fayaz, for example, who is currently director of the Hazara Cultural House in Finland and formerly served as NATO’s Senior Civilian Representative in Afghanistan, talks about the “very hard moment” in 2021 when he learned that the international community intended to withdraw from the country “without considering on-the-ground realities,” thereby undermining decades of peacebuilding work. Sandra Melone, founder and CEO of Zancora Consulting, touches on the subject of peacemaking as it relates to supporting women’s rights. “When a government claims that girls and women have the right to health and education,” she attests, “I would say, show us where the health services and education actually are.” The assemblage of these voices makes for valuable storytelling; these are men and women who have faced what Helen Kezie-Nwoha describes in her introduction as “the growing complexity of achieving negotiated settlements” in an increasingly fragmented and extremist world.
A valuable reminder of the value of fighting for peace.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2025
ISBN: 9781913641429
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Aurora Metro Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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