As Russia continues to threaten Ukraine in hybrid warfare, Aro provides an extremely valuable lesson.
Timely exposé of Russia’s vast disinformation campaign from a Finnish journalist persecuted for her persistent reporting of its brazen abuses.
In this important, firsthand account of Russian malfeasance, Aro shows how she has suffered personally and professionally during her diligent quest to expose the rampant social media incursions orchestrated by Putin and his minions. Her work is especially telling in terms of Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and implementation of its online “troll factory,” which meddled significantly in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Though the author had experience reporting on right-wing and extremist groups, “it wasn’t until I began examining the Kremlin’s tools of international information warfare that a hate campaign was launched against me.” She uncovered Russian cyberattacks as early as 2008, during the two-week war between Russia and Georgia. Years later, she interviewed Andrei Illarionov, one of Putin’s former aides, who provided useful, disturbing information about Russia’s deployment of psychological warfare in Ukraine. The author also reported on a well-known troll factory in St. Petersburg in 2013. Throughout this book, Aro reveals the mechanics of Russia’s insidious nonmilitary tactics and widespread propaganda targeted at civilians—strategies used decades before in both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to gain control over the minds of citizens. Due to her intrepid investigations, the author was forced to leave her home country of Finland in 2017. Though many Western media outlets failed to provide adequate protection, in 2019, the U.S. Department of State gave her the International Women of Courage Award—before rescinding it due to her criticism of Donald Trump. Although parts of the narrative may be overly detailed for general readers, the author is to be commended for both her journalism and for her creation of a damning portrait of Putin and his autocratic, manipulative regime.
As Russia continues to threaten Ukraine in hybrid warfare, Aro provides an extremely valuable lesson.Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-632-46129-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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