A provocative exploration of the appeal of terrorist groups and how to counter it effectively.
A National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist urges Americans to find new ways to think about terrorism and “deradicalizing” former violent extremists.
Power gives surprising answers to some of the knottiest moral, legal, and practical questions of the post–9/11 era: Why do people join terrorist groups? What do we owe former militants? What kinds of deradicalization will prevent recidivism? Drawing on globe-spanning interviews with sources ranging from lawyers and neurologists to former jihadis and their families, the author shows that violent extremists tend to lack the religious zealotry that Americans often ascribe to them. An expert on terrorist groups told her: “The reality is that by and large people don’t join for ideological reasons. They join for adventure, excitement, or camaraderie.” Many militants are also so young and gullible they are easy prey for the Islamic State group or other recruiters. In Britain, Power met with the mother of a slain 19-year-old who was so naïve when he joined IS that he called his mother from Syria to ask, “Mama, would it be okay if I rode on the commander’s motorbike?” In Pakistan, the author visited an acclaimed school that deradicalizes former Taliban soldiers, and in Jakarta, she spoke to an Indonesian man known as “the Terrorist Whisperer,” who helps ex-jihadis learn to give TED-style talks in the hope that their stories will deter others. Power’s exceptionally wide-ranging research persuaded her that Americans need to stop thinking about former militants in absolutist terms like “good and evil” and to take a more nuanced approach to fostering their deradicalization and preventing the backsliding that may occur during long imprisonments. Her argument may not sit well with those who—for religious, ideological, or other reasons—believe that evil exists and society benefits from acknowledging it, but this book is full of valuable insights into violent extremism.
A provocative exploration of the appeal of terrorist groups and how to counter it effectively.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-51057-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
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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