Of broad interest to students of geopolitics—and, sadly, warfighters as well.
A foreign correspondent examines the small-scale conflicts that threaten to heat up to major conflagrations.
Turkey-based journalist Smith opens with a little-reported fight that’s been going on intermittently ever since the Soviet Union dissolved, one between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the contested region of Nagorno-Karabakh, inhabited by ethnic Azeris and Armenians alike. The war has larger dimensions, and neighboring Iran, Turkey, and Russia are all keeping an eye open. “What’s happening today in some way resembles the period before the First World War,” Smith writes, for conflicts in small countries on the fringes of Europe can quickly draw in the larger nations, just as happened in 1914. In the Balkans, struggles continue between Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Muslims, with one Serbian warlord “denying the wartime crimes of Serb militias and repeatedly threatening to hold an independence referendum that would rip federal Bosnia in two.” Meantime, Kosovo still has a hot-button quality; Russia and Romania seem ready to scrap over the small Romanian enclave of Transnistria. Also, Putin’s Russia and its near-puppet in Belarus border on thousands of miles of NATO territories, even as Russia slugs away at Ukraine. Smith has traveled broadly to report on all these places, though she warns that it’s Turkey that bears close scrutiny, with strongman Recep Erdoğan coordinating “his most egregious acts at home to coincide with moments of regional turmoil, when Europe relies on his cooperation.” Within national territories, numerous ethnic groups are also struggling, as with the Tatars of Crimea and the Kurds in Syria, Turkey, and Iraq. “In order to see where the world is heading, we must study these places—but this is only part of the picture,” Smith writes—for history is made by people, and the hinterlands are full of places where people are on the edge, “their lives defined by upheaval.”
Of broad interest to students of geopolitics—and, sadly, warfighters as well.Pub Date: July 21, 2026
ISBN: 9781324098713
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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