Impassioned advice for reformers.
An earnest effort to inspire progressives to regain the political initiative now apparently firmly in conservative hands.
“Counterintuitive as it may seem, disaster creates unprecedented opportunity to change our world. When all is broken, disoriented, and rearranged…we can transform society.” So writes Zamalin, a political science and African American studies professor and author of Against Civility: The Hidden Racism in Our Obsession With Civility. He looks back fondly to the 1950s and ’60s, when movements for civil rights and against the Vietnam War genuinely influenced U.S. leaders, and then to the 1980s, when AIDS activists instigated real change. Nowadays, noisy crowds are likely to be harassing an abortion clinic or denouncing mask mandates. In 20 short, fiery chapters, Zamalin stresses the importance of nonviolent street action, political art, participatory democracy, radical environmentalism, reproductive freedom, and a “counterculture opposed to what’s corrosive in the mainstream.” At the same time, he denounces authoritarianism, jingoism, racism, and the American obsession with “national security” and worship of the free market. Zamalin emphasizes—and few readers will deny—that the unemployed, low-wage workers, and less-educated Americans suffer more in the capitalism system. In the past, they voted for left-leaning politicians, while right-leaning candidates, dominated by the middle class and financed by the wealthy, opposed them through legislation, court action, or even violence. As the middle class has hollowed out and wages have stagnated, many Americans have gotten restless and angry. Having received the short end of the stick from democracy, they show it little respect. Consequently, political candidates with autocratic tendencies have gained favor even as they seek to dismantle civil rights. Zamalin correctly points out that the wealthy have given a great deal of money to Donald Trump and similar figures, but he doesn’t adequately explore how the middle-class and less-educated sectors elected him. Still, activists will find useful pointers in this earnest manifesto.
Impassioned advice for reformers.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0608-5
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
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
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
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