Affecting, if a touch long, and a deft portrait of the dangers of blindly following leaders of whatever stripe.
Goal-oriented, driven, and often betrayed, the author recounts time spent in the twin cults of centrifugal Christianity and the American military.
“The first rule of cults is you are never in a cult,” writes Mestyanek Young, who grew up in the communal world of the Children of God, led by a self-styled prophet who gathered a group of young followers whom he thought of “as sheep, in need of a shepherd.” Moving from country to country—Brazil, Mexico, Japan—a step ahead of the authorities, the group, as described by the author, was both strict in discipline and extremely free-wheeling in matters of sex, especially sex with minors. As a young teenager, the author broke free, attended college, and married at 21, briefly settling into a relationship that was problematic even years after her divorce. She also joined the U.S. Army, which had many of the cultish ingredients of her youth, especially the view that “as a woman, you’re either a bitch, a slut, or a dyke.” Even so, and despite her revulsion at superior officers’ defense of torture, Mestyanek Young excelled in leadership skills, working in intelligence in Afghanistan. “I was sure I could be a part of the army but not owned by it, that a person could have brains and independent, innovative thoughts” she writes, quickly adding, “I was wrong.” When she ran afoul of the command structure, her career ground to a halt. The author recounts her story in a series of episodes that become repetitive in the reading even as it’s clear that she was treated unjustly, at least by civilian standards. In the end, her message is compelling: A cult is a cult, she writes, and being a member makes it easy “to hate, harm, even kill because we are the good guys.”
Affecting, if a touch long, and a deft portrait of the dangers of blindly following leaders of whatever stripe.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-28011-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
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
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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