Devoid of rhetoric, this evenhanded work exemplifies outstanding reportage.
A thorough investigation into how Roe v. Wade fell.
“The antiabortion movement succeeded because most people did not believe it would.” So write Dias, national religion correspondent for the New York Times, and Lerer, a Times political reporter, who interviewed hundreds of people and reported from 16 states and the District of Columbia. The authors organize the 36 chapters into four chronological parts. “The Righteous Fight” begins with the huge influence of Marjorie Dannenfelser, an antiabortion activist who viewed the movement as “a spiritual battle about what it means to be human.” The authors go on to chronicle the history of Planned Parenthood, long supported by Republicans. In the second part, “The Political War,” Dias and Lerer delineate how that support turned into opposition as the organization came to represent “the diminished power of traditional religion, gender roles, and families in American life.” In a culture where Democratic voters proved to be unmotivated by abortion, the antiabortion movement was reemerging and gaining momentum among Republicans, especially social conservatives. “For more than forty years, the antiabortion movement was David, fighting Goliath,” write the authors, “but the country had shifted, and they were giants.” The third section, “The Chessboard,” covers Trump’s election and details how he garnered support among antiabortion voters. Following his victory, liberals were caught off guard; they had no planned response to the threat against abortion rights. In “The Fate of the Nation,” the authors examine Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation and how the Supreme Court became “more conservative than at any other point in modern history.” At that point, antiabortion leaders were able to flip the court. The book’s greatest strength is the authors’ comprehensive and incisive approach to explaining that “Roe did not just fall once, on June 24, 2022. Roe collapsed over a transformational decade.”
Devoid of rhetoric, this evenhanded work exemplifies outstanding reportage.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781250881397
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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 dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.
Enduring the unthinkable.
This memoir—the first by an Israeli taken captive by Hamas on October 7, 2023—chronicles the 491 days the author was held in Gaza. Confined to tunnels beneath war-ravaged streets, Sharabi was beaten, humiliated, and underfed. When he was finally released in February, he learned that Hamas had murdered his wife and two daughters. In the face of scarcely imaginable loss, Sharabi has crafted a potent record of his will to survive. The author’s ordeal began when Hamas fighters dragged him from his home, in a kibbutz near Gaza. Alongside others, he was held for months at a time in filthy subterranean spaces. He catalogs sensory assaults with novelistic specificity. Iron shackles grip his ankles. Broken toilets produce an “unbearable stink,” and “tiny white worms” swarm his toothbrush. He gets one meal a day, his “belly caving inward.” Desperate for more food, he stages a fainting episode, using a shaving razor to “slice a deep gash into my eyebrow.” Captors share their sweets while celebrating an Iranian missile attack on Israel. He and other hostages sneak fleeting pleasures, finding and downing an orange soda before a guard can seize it. Several times, Sharabi—51 when he was kidnapped—gives bracing pep talks to younger compatriots. The captives learn to control what they can, trading family stories and “lift[ing] water bottles like dumbbells.” Remarkably, there’s some levity. He and fellow hostages nickname one Hamas guard “the Triangle” because he’s shaped like a SpongeBob SquarePants character. The book’s closing scenes, in which Sharabi tries to console other hostages’ families while learning the worst about his own, are heartbreaking. His captors “are still human beings,” writes Sharabi, bravely modeling the forbearance that our leaders often lack.
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780063489790
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper Influence/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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