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
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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