A stirring indictment, with a warning that there are likely to be other massacres and that “the UN must undergo a...
A haunted account by Lt.-Gen. Dallaire, a former UN force commander, of the ethnic slaughter that ten years ago consumed a nation.
Favoring the light-skinned, indigenous Tutsi people over the short, dark farmers of the Hutu nation, the Belgians who colonized Rwanda gave Tutsi leaders privileged positions in the government. Following independence, the Hutu rose up against the Tutsi, many of whom fled to neighboring countries and organized a rebel army. The back-and-forth killings eventually brought UN intervention, which did little to stem the bloodshed; in a period of only 100 days, some 800,000 Rwandans died. “Let there be no doubt,” writes Dallaire, “the Rwandan genocide was the ultimate responsibility of those Rwandans who planned, ordered, supervised and eventually conducted it.” But, he adds, responsibility also lies with the international community: the UN posted an inadequate force in Rwanda and failed to support the soldiers on the ground; France sent troops only to protect the Hutu génocidaires; the US, stung by the debacle in Somalia the year before, actively opposed intervention. Throughout, Dallaire is clearly anguished by his personal inability to stop the killing. In one affecting passage, he recounts fording a river choked with dead bodies: “ . . . my stomach heaved and I struggled for composure. I couldn’t bear the movement of the bridge, up and down on the slaughtered hundreds.” His guilt also centers on UN soldiers who died in the field, at least once as a result of “my poor operational decision.” In her introduction, Samantha Power (“A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide) observes that Dallaire experienced post-traumatic stress disorder; coupled with his insistence on testifying against the killers at an international war-crimes tribunal, it led to his dismissal from the Canadian army.
A stirring indictment, with a warning that there are likely to be other massacres and that “the UN must undergo a renaissance if it is to be involved in conflict resolution . . . . Otherwise the hope that we will ever truly enter an age of humanity will die as the UN continues to decline into irrelevance.”Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1510-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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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