Controversial, as Lévy is wont to be, but nuanced, and an argument worth hearing out.
The eminent French philosopher and journalist champions Israel at a time when that nation is increasingly isolated.
Only one option remains to Israel in its war against Hamas and Hezbollah, and by extension Iran, writes Lévy: “That option is to win.” Known to his French compatriots as BHL, Lévy holds that winning must almost certainly come in the form of military action, putting victory squarely in the hands of the Israeli Defense Forces “while taking every possible precaution to minimize civilian casualties.” While Lévy argues that the IDF has taken those precautions, the devastation of Gaza notwithstanding, he does acknowledge exceptions, as with the killing of workers for the World Central Kitchen—a “mistake,” he asserts, that should be adjudicated. As for the precipitating Event—Lévy capitalizes it in the sense of a black swan event that can be guessed at but never accurately forecast—he is unwavering: The death of children is unforgivable, he urges, and on Oct. 7, 2023, “Hamas made no distinction between adults and children,” deliberately attacking civilians and kidnapping and killing minors. Lévy adds, with evident contempt for the defenders of Hamas on the world’s campuses and social media platforms, “I need no lessons on this subject from those who did not weep with me over the children gassed by Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, the children drowned off the coast of Lampedusa in their open migrant boats, the children bled white in Yemen, Nigeria, or Mogadishu.” That may not be a winning formula for changing minds, but the larger point of Lévy’s essay is that Israel stands alone because of both antisemitism and the tyranny of public opinion, with too many people forgetting that Palestine’s leaders “thought only of annihilating” those on the other side of the wall.
Controversial, as Lévy is wont to be, but nuanced, and an argument worth hearing out.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9798888457832
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Wicked Son
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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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