A mesmerizing tribute to the transformative power of community.
Celebrating a devastated city’s slow comeback from poverty, crime, and corruption.
Alexander’s latest exploration of American life (after The Hospital, 2021, and Glass House, 2017) is a gripping account of the blighted and bankrupt city of Chester, Pennsylvania, and the people who live there. He argues that corporate corruption and unscrupulous local politicians have, for well over a century, ensnared Chesterians in a lethal web of greed and grift, depriving them of employment, good health, and proper educational opportunities. The majority-Black city became a dumping ground for toxic waste, too. In 2025, the local hospital was shuttered; affordable access to the city’s own water is still under dispute. Chester’s decline was not a result of party politics—“Democrats had run Chester, and Republicans had run Chester and Chester was still Chester”—but of a massive failure of morality and vision. Accepted by the Chesterians as one of their own, Alexander writes with affection about his memorable protagonist, the former sewage plant operator Stefan Roots. Elected mayor in 2024, Roots and his allies learned to scale back their ambitions and settle for achievable goals: “progress came one trimmed tree, one paved road, one community trash day at a time.” The book displays the author’s extensive research, his consummate skill at creating dramatic intensity, and his fine ear for authentic dialogue. Its pace slackens a bit in the interspersed detours into community organizing and the frequent, if appropriate, asides on the dangers of capitalism. Chester, according to the author, exemplifies what happens when America has lost “the thread of its original narrative” and yielded to nihilism. Readers may wonder if that narrative, written long ago by wealthy whites for other wealthy whites, ever had much room for the citizens of Chester. Yet the author’s thesis that this city has a message for a national government that has “elevated profit into a religion” remains relevant and entirely persuasive.
A mesmerizing tribute to the transformative power of community.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2026
ISBN: 9781250329943
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2026
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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