An authoritative account of Russia’s bombing of a shelter for displaced Ukrainians.
A vicious attack on civilians.
This is essential reporting about a defining atrocity of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Verini’s focus is Mariupol, Ukraine, where in March 2022, Russia bombed a theater sheltering refugees, killing as many as 200, according to credible estimates. Much like They Will Have To Die Now (2019), his book on an Iraqi city taken by ISIS, Verini’s informative interviews and no-nonsense prose bring us as close as possible to his subjects’ experiences. As ceilings and walls collapse, some survivors are knocked unconscious. Others dig through rubble in search of loved ones. A boy learns his mother has died when he spots her pink nail polish on a severed arm. After, there are mass graves and maddening claims by zombis—the local term for those brainwashed by Vladimir Putin’s propaganda—that the bombing was a hoax. Verini’s description of the carnage is especially powerful because it’s preceded by sharp profiles of the refugees. We come to know them as students, actors, and laborers before they’re victims. In the days prior to the bombing, a refugee-physician establishes a “makeshift infirmary,” treating a pneumonia-stricken baby in the theater’s spotlight booth. Working with a soldering iron and the bulbs of Christmas tree lights, a handy teen builds “crude flashlights” for refugees. A scrappy girl arrives at the theater with little more than the boxing medals she’s won. Verini lets us hear his subjects—Putin is “Botoks Oblychchia, ‘Botox Face,’ or simply svolota, ‘bastard’”—but doesn’t sentimentalize their bravery. Some emerged as heroes, but others “wouldn’t spare a piece of firewood for a freezing grandmother.” Summoning an almost unbearably plaintive image, he describes how before the attack, refugees painted “children” in huge Russian letters in front and back of the building, which a Russian pilot “must have seen” as he “depressed the bomb-release button on his stick grip.”
An authoritative account of Russia’s bombing of a shelter for displaced Ukrainians.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9781668062203
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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