A revealing look at what’s behind the new Iron Curtain.
Intrepid Norwegian journalist Seierstad recounts a sojourn in Putin’s Russia.
Late in her narrative, Seierstad crosses the border from Estonia into Russia and, at a checkpoint, is grilled by a young security officer. “I mentioned the book I’d written in Afghanistan. ‘Bookseller of where?’ Bereft of general knowledge though he seemed to be, surely a Russian employed by the Security Service had to be familiar with Kabul?” The ignorance was real, and, combined with an evident lack of curiosity, it’s something she encounters frequently in her travels—that, and “control and surveillance, a cult of personality, xenophobia, internal and external enemies.” As it turns out, the real object of the inquiry was to find the whereabouts of Andrey Medvedev, a former mercenary in the Wagner Group who had deserted and fled to Norway. Medvedev is not a nice guy: He’s done time for beating women, burglary, and various other crimes committed both in Russia and Norway, where, for good reason, his application for asylum has been rejected. He may be a brute, but he knows his books: As he tells Seierstad, early on, “My story should be written like Shantaram, but you should feel like you’re reading Dostoevsky.” In five extended stories, Seierstad depicts the grimness of life in a police state. Interviewing a university professor who laments the loss of scholarly collaboration with American counterparts, she hears an interesting take on affairs: “The Soviet era was totalitarian, and things worked relatively well,” he says. “Now the state’s authoritarian and works relatively poorly.” Fact-checking has gone out the door in journalism (“It’s just as well Orwell’s dead,” grumbles an editor), the rich get richer, and a seemingly endless war with Ukraine grinds on, on which she interviews a Russian computer geek who’s volunteered to guide Ukrainian drones: “It’s like World of Warcraft. My avatar is a wizard. I summon creatures to fight for me.”
A revealing look at what’s behind the new Iron Curtain.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2027
ISBN: 9780316613736
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: today
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2026
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
