A well-written, convincing case for why Ukraine matters to the world’s future.
In this nonfiction book, a foreign relations expert surveys the global impact of Russia’s war against Ukraine and offers context.
Dedicated to “all Ukrainians” who “shall triumph over this war too,” this volume analyzes the Eastern European nation’s historic relationship with Russia and how the world came to its “most challenging moment” since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Chowdhury’s erudite account walks readers through the turbulent history of Ukraine during World War II and the Cold War, its post-Soviet independence, and the forces inside Russia that initiated the current conflict. While this story is not unknown, it is related here in an accessible yet nuanced writing style. And the book often adds underreported elements to its contextualization of the war. While not justifying his behavior, the work complicates the standard depictions of Vladimir Putin, reminding readers that he petitioned for NATO membership during his first term as president. Indeed, throughout Putin’s first two terms in office, at a time when he “needed the West to rebuild, reshape and reorganize Russia from the economic mess he inherited,” he presented his country as an unflinching advocate of America’s war on terror and provided logistical support for United States endeavors in Afghanistan. It was only after his subsequent reelection in 2012 that Putin’s posturing shifted to anti-Western rhetoric that promised Russian citizens a “new destiny” and the nation’s return to its former glory, which corresponded with military expeditions in Syria, Libya, Georgia, and Crimea. The roots of this book lie in Chowdhury’s undergraduate thesis at George Mason University, which in part explored Ukraine’s complex history. Two decades later, as a fellow at the Global Policy Institute with a graduate degree from Harvard University and multiple books on Middle Eastern geopolitics and nuclear arms, the author provided significant updates to his unpublished work on Ukraine. Backed by solid research found in more than 30 pages of references, this volume is a detailed, historically minded addition to the conversations surrounding Russia’s war in Ukraine. But at more than 400 pages, the book may be intimidating to some readers.
A well-written, convincing case for why Ukraine matters to the world’s future.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2022
ISBN: 9798888317846
Page Count: 421
Publisher: Fabrezan & Phillipe
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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