Exquisitely rendered maps of troubled territories, buttressed by a philosophical framework.
This land is (not) your land.
“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.” Mark Twain’s sardonic observation comes to mind when reading this captivating and wide-ranging collection of maps that highlight conflicts and disputes around the world. “Most often, borders are drawn in blood,” write the authors. “Even if we don’t take decolonization into account, more than a hundred states have established their borders through war.” Papin and Laborde are cartographers at the French daily Le Monde, and Tertrais is deputy director of the Foundation for Strategic Research, a French think tank on international security issues. Beyond their many visually arresting maps, the authors also include insightful aperçus—the book is French, after all—that don’t usually make it into an atlas. The authors quote, for instance, the late legal scholar François Terré: “All borders are artificial, in the sense that they are defined by men and are therefore arbitrary: they are scars left by history.” Among those scars are numerous hot zones. Individual pages are devoted to Kashmir, the Mideast, and the South China Sea. A few maps explore the evolution of Ukraine, Russia’s invasion of that country, and Russia’s sphere of influence; as with all the images in the book, these maps are sharply designed in muted colors and accompanied by useful text. There’s much that will be new to readers: The Germany-Denmark border was established by a public referendum in 1920; a third of the world’s recent pirate attacks have occurred in the Gulf of Guinea; and tiny Märket, in the Baltic Sea, is the smallest island in the world divided by two countries (Sweden and Finland). Other maps document more familiar subjects. Addressing a global “proliferation of walls, barriers and fences”—notably, the world’s most traveled border, that between the U.S. and Mexico—the authors glean wisdom from philosopher Thierry Paquot: “A wall expresses a lack of understanding, separation, segregation….The builder of walls is a polluter of humanity.”
Exquisitely rendered maps of troubled territories, buttressed by a philosophical framework.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780500030493
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
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
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