A retired Canadian general’s impassioned call for action to eliminate the world’s most “cost-effective and renewable weapon system in existence today”: the child soldier.
Dallaire (Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, 2004), founder and head of the Child Soldiers Initiative (CSI), writes that he first encountered child combatants while leading the international peacekeeping mission in Rwanda in 1993. Ever since, he has been haunted by the fact that some 250,000 children—40 percent of them girls—are being robbed of their innocence while serving with government and rebel forces in world conflicts. All under 18, and some as young as eight, child soldiers have fought in more than 30 conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, Europe and other regions. While human-rights conventions and laws prohibit such use of children, writes the author, little has been done to enforce them. Dallaire’s troubling book, written out of evident frustration over the world’s failure to act, draws on six years of CSI research. He writes that children who grow up poor, undernourished and often orphaned in areas of conflict are regularly recruited by ruthless adult military leaders offering money, drugs, uniforms, chants and rallies that give a sense of belonging. The children are readily available in overpopulated countries, and lightweight assault rifles and other easy-to-use weapons can be obtained for them without difficulty. Girls, often overlooked in discussions of this topic, are valued not only as combatants but also as cooks, nurses and sex slaves. After indoctrination and grueling training, the children become vicious frontline killers. Three chapters are fictional narratives in which Dallaire conjures the horrors of soldiering from a child’s point of view. The author outlines steps to prevent the recruitment of children for warfare and urges readers to help create the political will to act against recruiters and arms dealers. A blunt, angry cry: “What has humanity created?”
Pub Date: May 24, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8027-7956-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
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
PERSPECTIVES
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