A well-argued, accessible commentary on one of today’s most complicated geopolitical issues.
Chowdhury analyzes the intertwined foreign politics of America, Israel, and Iran.
As a college graduate seeking to start a career on Wall Street in 2003, Chowdhury was appalled by his classmates’ reactions to the buildup to the war in Iraq, which went far beyond policy disagreements. He observed how they “uncritically consumed…the propaganda pouring out of Washington” and embraced a binary view of “good versus evil.” While the domestic context is different, he sees a similar movement toward war with Iran, particularly following the Trump administration’s attack on its nuclear facilities in June 2025. Seeking to “humanize a country” often treated in Western media as a continual global threat, the author emphasizes the ways Iranians—from librarians who maintain archives of “ancient Persian tolerance” to disillusioned students whose censored critiques are ubiquitous on social media behind virtual private networks—defy Western stereotypes. While critical of the official government stances taken by Israel, Iran, and the U.S., the author extends similar nuance to Israel’s internal debates, which he argues are “fractious, layered, and intensely contested” despite the lack of journalistic attention to dissident voices. Per the book’s convincing analysis, America’s hardline stance against Iran’s nuclear program—whose roots lie ironically in Dwight Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” initiative in the 1950s—is problematic due to its inherent double standard, which confirms American hypocrisy in the minds of many Iranian officials. With an eye toward peace, Chowdhury argues that war with Iran could intensify regional instability (similar to the way the invasion of Iraq preceded decades of violent chaos), and lasting peace “demands a fundamental shift in how each side sees the other.” The book’s informed analysis, backed by a network of research endnotes, is balanced by an engaging style written by a skilled author who has penned both nonfiction books and historical novels. Its nuanced analysis will challenge the preconceptions of readers on all sides of the debate, prioritizing the inherent humanity that transcends geographical, religious, and political boundaries.
A well-argued, accessible commentary on one of today’s most complicated geopolitical issues.Pub Date: July 31, 2025
ISBN: 9798898528911
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Fabrezan & Phillipe
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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