A savvy account of two of the most consequential U.S. Senate elections in recent history.
A political reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution follows the hard-fought Georgia Senate campaigns that broke the Republican stranglehold on a bright-red state.
In his first book, Bluestein shows how grassroots efforts by Stacey Abrams and others helped lead to runoff elections that sent two Democratic trailblazers to the U.S. Senate: Jon Ossoff, who “entered the race to muted fanfare as an unknown, ‘make Trump furious’ candidate”; and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the first Black senator from Georgia. In 2020—buoyed by 1.5 million new voters and Abrams’ narrow loss in her 2018 race for governor—Democrats mostly stopped trying to regain power by posing as “Republican-lite” candidates. “Instead,” the author writes, “leaders energized the party’s core constituencies—including many who rarely cast ballots—with policies that just years prior would have seemed unthinkable: Gun control. Decriminalization of marijuana. An end to crackdowns on illegal immigrants. Progressive social and economic initiatives. An expansion of abortion rights.” Against the backdrop of the pandemic and the racially motivated murder of Ahmaud Arbery, Bluestein gives a closely observed and well-reported account of how the Democratic winners mobilized new voters—Ossoff’s aides courted Gen Z by playing into viral memes on TikTok—and survived the November election. Then both faced runoffs complicated by Trump’s bitter and unrelenting efforts to invalidate the presidential vote in Georgia. It’s a brisk and colorful story, full of twists: Ossoff’s opponent, former Dollar General CEO David Perdue, had to self-quarantine after exposure to Covid-19; Warnock faced WNBA franchise co-owner Kelly Loeffler, who boasted of being “more conservative than Attila the Hun”; and “proud Trekker” Abrams enlivened an online forum called “Star Trek: The Next Election.” Bluestein’s portrayal of Warnock is thin and largely unilluminating—events such as his contentious divorce get skimpy notice—but an otherwise rich cast keeps the book engaging even if it reveals less about him than about some of its minor figures.
A savvy account of two of the most consequential U.S. Senate elections in recent history.Pub Date: March 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-48915-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
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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