Karatnycky combines eyewitness accounts with historical analysis, adding depth and insight to the bulletins of war.
An authoritative account of how the Russian invasion, meant to bury Ukrainian culture, has had exactly the opposite effect.
Ukraine’s battle against Russia has become a defining event of our time, testing the limits of Western will and demonstrating how an emerging democracy can fight against a larger, belligerent power. Karatnycky, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and the CEO of the nonprofit Freedom House, is not an impartial commentator, and he clearly lays out his deep, longstanding personal and professional ties to the country. The author examines the development of cultural trends since 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine declared independence. He frames the story by examining the presidential administrations since that time, which have veered between democratic populists like Viktor Yushchenko and corrupt oligarchs such as Leonid Kuchma. Power ebbed and flowed in various ways, from public demonstrations to government thuggery, which meant that no stable model of government emerged. Behind the scenes, writes Karatnycky, a sense of national identity was recovering, drawing on Ukraine’s rich history and cultural distinctiveness. The author devotes two chapters to Volodymyr Zelensky, first examining his early stumbles and overdependence on social media. Amazingly, after the invasion, Zelensky rose to the challenge, becoming a resolute national figure and displaying hands-on courage. Between Zelensky’s leadership and the requirements of war, the Ukrainian identity solidified, becoming the most potent weapon of the conflict. Karatnycky believes that Ukraine will eventually prevail, but it needs continued support, including advanced weaponry and the transfer of $300 billion in Russian assets held in Western banks as reparations. He might be overly optimistic about this idea, but his book is an important addition to the literature, featuring an innovative approach that provides a useful background.
Karatnycky combines eyewitness accounts with historical analysis, adding depth and insight to the bulletins of war.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9780300269468
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.
A wide-ranging critique of leftist politics as not being left enough.
Continuing his examination of progressive reform movements begun with The Cult of Smart, Marxist analyst deBoer takes on a left wing that, like all political movements, is subject to “the inertia of established systems.” The great moment for the left, he suggests, ought to have been the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the accumulated crimes of Donald Trump should have led to more than a minor upheaval. In Minneapolis, he writes, first came the call from the city council to abolish the police, then make reforms, then cut the budget; the grace note was “an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.” What happened? The author answers with the observation that it is largely those who can afford it who populate the ranks of the progressive movement, and they find other things to do after a while, even as those who stand to benefit most from progressive reform “lack the cultural capital and economic stability to have a presence in our national media and politics.” The resulting “elite capture” explains why the Democratic Party is so ineffectual in truly representing minority and working-class constituents. Dispirited, deBoer writes, “no great American revolution is coming in the early twenty-first century.” Accommodation to gradualism was once counted heresy among doctrinaire Marxists, but deBoer holds that it’s likely the only truly available path toward even small-scale gains. Meanwhile, he scourges nonprofits for diluting the tax base. It would be better, he argues, to tax those who can afford it rather than allowing deductible donations and “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.” Usefully, the author also argues that identity politics centering on difference will never build a left movement, which instead must find common cause against conservatism and fascism.
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016015
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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