Courage and folly, dedication and tragedy: Ackerman deftly captures all dimensions of a protracted foreign policy failure.
Making sense of chaos is never easy, but this powerful book does much to explain why America’s debacle in Afghanistan ended the way it did.
Ackerman, who spent years in the region as a frontline soldier and later as a CIA paramilitary officer, brings firsthand experience of combat as well as a knowledge of classical literature to the story. He is also the author of multiple acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, including Green on Blue, Places and Names, and Red Dress in Black & White. In his latest, Ackerman focuses on the final week of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, when a flood of Afghans clamored to evacuate. The fifth act of the book’s title, this period encompassed the climax and denouement of the ordeal—and, much like the events of the previous 20 years, it was a catastrophic mess. The author tried to help old friends and their families escape, working with a network of other veterans and in-country players. Adding a sense of bizarre surrealism, he did most of this by phone while on a family holiday, trying to shield them from the unfolding disaster. The attack at the Kabul airport, which killed more than 180 people, added another layer of mayhem. “If it wasn’t clear already,” Ackerman writes, “after the bombing at Abbey Gate it becomes evident that the Biden administration has handled the evacuation of Afghanistan with an exceptional degree of incompetence.” However, it’s clear the author could not walk away, and he explains why in chapters about his time in the field, fighting a conflict that seemed increasingly futile. While noting that Afghanistan has never really known peace, he hopes that American actions have contributed to the destruction of the country’s infrastructure of terrorism. Ackerman should be commended not just for his work helping Afghans escape safely, but also for providing a must-read account of the end of America’s longest war.
Courage and folly, dedication and tragedy: Ackerman deftly captures all dimensions of a protracted foreign policy failure.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-49204-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A top-flight nonfiction debut from a unique artist.
The acclaimed director displays his talents as a film critic.
Tarantino’s collection of essays about the important movies of his formative years is packed with everything needed for a powerful review: facts about the work, context about the creative decisions, and whether or not it was successful. The Oscar-winning director of classic films like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs offers plenty of attitude with his thoughts on movies ranging from Animal House to Bullitt to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to The Big Chill. Whether you agree with his assessments or not, he provides the original reporting and insights only a veteran director would notice, and his engaging style makes it impossible to leave an essay without learning something. The concepts he smashes together in two sentences about Taxi Driver would take a semester of film theory class to unpack. Taxi Driver isn’t a “paraphrased remake” of The Searchers like Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? is a paraphrased remake of Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby or De Palma’s Dressed To Kill is a paraphrased remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho. But it’s about as close as you can get to a paraphrased remake without actually being one. Robert De Niro’s taxi driving protagonist Travis Bickle is John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards. Like any good critic, Tarantino reveals bits of himself as he discusses the films that are important to him, recalling where he was when he first saw them and what the crowd was like. Perhaps not surprisingly, the author was raised by movie-loving parents who took him along to watch whatever they were watching, even if it included violent or sexual imagery. At the age of 8, he had seen the very adult MASH three times. Suddenly the dark humor of Kill Bill makes much more sense. With this collection, Tarantino offers well-researched love letters to his favorite movies of one of Hollywood’s most ambitious eras.
A top-flight nonfiction debut from a unique artist.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-311258-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
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