Skillfully exploring the link between an infamous subway attack and mean-spirited politics.
Vigilantism roils the nation.
Thompson, a Pulitzer winner for Blood in the Water, her history of a 1971 prison uprising, not only presents a comprehensive account of a vicious outburst that shook New York four decades ago. She also elucidates how the incident still has a malign influence. On December 22, 1984, Bernhard Goetz, a 37-year-old Manhattanite, shot four Black teens on a city subway. The victims, she writes, were “boisterous,” but Goetz, an unabashed bigot, said he didn’t feel threatened. “If I had more bullets, I would have shot them all again and again,” he told police. The victims survived but were forever changed, Thompson writes. One suffered brain damage and would spend his life in a wheelchair; another “deliberately overdosed” on the 27th anniversary of the shooting. Goetz, meanwhile, gained numerous white admirers. He signed autographs, received a Good Samaritan award, and did under a year in prison. Thompson thoroughly covers the court proceedings, but she truly excels when exploring the broader trends that led to the shooting and the “throughline” connecting Goetz to “the America of President Donald Trump.” Digging into Ronald Reagan’s policies—tax cuts for the rich, funding decreases for city services—she explains how high unemployment and underfunded schools in urban neighborhoods were among the “larger forces working against” the victims. Subsequently, the “white racial rage” supporting Goetz empowered right-wing organizations like the NRA, politicians like Rudy Giuliani, whose stop-and-frisk policing openly discriminated against people of color, and media organizations like Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, which championed Goetz and honed a belligerent conservatism now seen by millions of Murdoch’s Fox News viewers. Thompson’s prose can be repetitive—more than two dozen sentences start with the phrase “what is more”—but her skill for historical dot-connecting makes this a worthy, informative book.
Skillfully exploring the link between an infamous subway attack and mean-spirited politics.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780593702093
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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