A distressing but important read.
A firsthand report from deep inside Congo.
Covering much of the center of Africa, Congo is “[b]lessed with deposits of ninety percent of the world’s minerals”—gold, tin, copper, diamonds and more—worth trillions of dollars. These considerable resources have led to multiple conflicts between Congo and its neighboring countries, as well as strife within. With Congo at peace for less than a decade now, Rawlence, a senior researcher on Africa for Human Rights Watch, was finally able to explore the country, and he describes Congo as nothing less than “the most fascinating, beguiling, and…misunderstood country on the continent.” After looking back on his own introduction to Congo, the author gives readers a cursory introduction to the complex history of the nation before launching into his exploration. In a narrative that is part travelogue and part reportage, Rawlence crisscrosses the country, describing the Congolese he meets with vivid and often lyrical prose. He describes a former militia captain, who may or may not have committed unspeakable atrocities during wartime, now “sitting in the sunshine with a child on his knee,” as he “rubs the head of his son while his wife laughs and smiles and winnows the rice with her hard and wrinkled hands.” However, such beauty is overshadowed by the problems that still plague the country: former refugees returning to find that “Congo does not have enough schools even for those who are already here,” food shortages and runaway inflation. Rawlence also points out that “[t]he incidence of rape in eastern Congo is the highest in the world.” Some readers may find it difficult to see the titular “signals of hope” amid so much sadness.
A distressing but important read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-85168-965-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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