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
The choir is sure to enjoy this impassioned preaching on familiar progressive themes.
Essays on current political topics by a high-profile actor and activist.
Milano explains in an introduction that she began writing this uneven collection while dealing with a severe case of Covid-19 and suffering from "persistent brain fog.” In the first essay, "On Being Unapologetically Fucked Up,” the author begins by fuming over a February 2019 incident in which she compared MAGA caps worn by high school kids to KKK hoods. She then runs through a grab bag of flash-point news items (police shootings, border crimes, sexual predators in government), deploying the F-bomb with abandon and concluding, "What I know is that fucked up is as fundamental a state of the world as night and day. But I know there is better. I know that ‘less fucked up’ is a state we can live in.” The second essay, "Believe Women," discusses Milano’s seminal role in the MeToo movement; unfortunately, it is similarly conversational in tone and predictable in content. One of the few truly personal essays, "David," about the author's marriage, refutes the old saw about love meaning never having to say you're sorry, replacing it with "Love means you can suggest a national sex strike and your husband doesn't run away screaming." Milano assumes, perhaps rightly, that her audience is composed of followers and fans; perhaps these readers will know what she is talking about in the seemingly allegorical "By Any Other Name," about her bad experience with a certain rosebush. "Holy shit, giving birth sucked," begins one essay. "Words are weird, right?" begins the next. "Welp, this is going to piss some of you off. Hang in there," opens a screed about cancel culture—though she’s entirely correct that “it’s childish, divisive, conceited, and Trumpian to its core.” By the end, however, Milano's intelligence, compassion, integrity, and endurance somewhat compensate for her lack of literary polish.
The choir is sure to enjoy this impassioned preaching on familiar progressive themes.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18329-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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