A searing attack on historical injustices.
Beyond catastrophes.
Accounts of epidemics are a respectable publishing genre, but journalist and science historian Bonhomme uses them as a springboard for exploring inequality. Cholera, a major 19th-century killer, seems to be the subject of the first chapter, yet in a preview of what follows, Bonhomme opens in 1857 New Orleans, where a white physician lectured a meeting of the New Orleans Academy of Science on the supposed inferiority of the Black race. The audience listened respectfully. Although Bonhomme summarizes the nature of cholera, the purported causes (all wrong), and its treatment (always useless, often harmful) according to antebellum medical science, she describes the unspeakable conditions under which enslaved people lived. Readers will realize that this is not a history of epidemics but a fierce polemic arguing that minorities and the poor suffer when diseases rage because governments and the medical profession give them short shrift. The second chapter focuses on Africa during the colonial period. Sleeping sickness was rampant, and European physicians, eager to apply the latest science to conquer it, forced indigenous victims to undergo experiments without their permission, prescribing toxic drugs forbidden in Europe, and failed. The author’s discussion of Ebola emphasizes the ravages of colonialism, which left African nations with inadequate medical care systems. Readers may be surprised to learn that Ebola, mostly fatal in Africa, is curable when treated in a modern hospital. The 1918 influenza pandemic, meanwhile, plays a modest role in a compelling account of how authors, notably Virginia Woolf, dealt with illness by writing. “In her letters to family and friends,” writes Bonhomme, “she reflected on her pain, noting, ‘My hand shakes no longer, but my mind vibrates uncomfortably, as it always does after an incursion of visitors; unexpected, and slightly unsympathetic.’ Even when she suffered, Woolf’s beautiful prose pulls one to her world.”
A searing attack on historical injustices.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781982197834
Page Count: 320
Publisher: One Signal/Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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