If you’re taking bets on where the next war will break out, this is essential reading.
A look at the world’s flash points for conflict, whose number seems to be growing exponentially.
Andelman has long served as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times and CBS News. He also studied at Harvard with the diplomatic historian Ernest R. May and the one-time master of intelligent realpolitik Henry Kissinger. Both taught him how nations have used—and should use—“lines in the sand” to indicate that beyond a certain point, no foe shall pass, physically or metaphorically. Those lines, themselves metaphorical, were once fairly distinct and relatively few. In Africa 30 years ago, writes the author, there were just two, one of which “surrounded Libya and Qaddafi’s pernicious regime” while the other marked off Chad as a warning against Libyan incursion. Now, he writes, at least 250 million Africans live along flash points such as the ones that divide northern from southern Nigeria and mark off areas contested by groups such as Boko Haram and that are closely monitored by U.S. drones operating out of neighboring Niger. The best of these thou-shalt-not-cross zones are “skillfully drawn and quite clear in their intentions.” The old Iron Curtain might serve as an example, except that the current president of Hungary, Trump ally Viktor Orbán, has ordered a $500 million containment fence built along the border with Serbia, “more high-tech, even more secure than the barrier the Soviets once built along their red line with the West.” Its message: If you’re not Hungarian, stay out. Its subtext: We don’t care that the rest of Europe is “fully united and barrier-free,” especially in a time when nationalist movements are rising in response to non-European immigrants who are, yes, crossing red lines of their own. Andelman’s points are sometimes too repetitively made, but the central truth holds: Everywhere around the world, people are digging in, and there’s a fight sure to come.
If you’re taking bets on where the next war will break out, this is essential reading.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64313-648-6
Page Count: 484
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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