A thoughtful and morally driven work that urges readers to rethink both their politics and their roles in public life.
Elefante argues that democracies rise or fall on the moral formation of their citizens in this nonfiction work.
The author positions this book at the intersection of memoir, political theory, and spiritual inquiry. The work is prescriptive rather than descriptive—Elefante outlines the ways in which individual people must change in order for democratic systems to function. The autobiographical opening, detailing his turning to meditation in 2019, his reconciliation with Catholicism, and the personal crises that shaped his thinking, serves less as an illustrative narrative than as an assertion of moral credentials; Elefante presents lived experience as evidence that inner discipline can translate into outward civic responsibility. The author’s core argument is that systemic dysfunction reflects individual moral failure. Elefante resists the easy scapegoating of institutions, insisting that “we” create and sustain the very systems we critique. This insistence on personal accountability gives the work urgency, particularly in passages that challenge readers to move beyond passive dissatisfaction. The analysis occasionally simplifies complex structural issues, however, leaning heavily on personal transformation as a primary solution. The book is most successful in its articulation of “kindness” as a civic virtue. Elefante’s distinction between kindness and superficial civility is one of the text’s sharpest contributions, reframing political engagement as an active moral practice rather than a performative one. His emphasis on “mutual recognition” and his critique of ideological dehumanization cut through familiar partisan rhetoric with clarity and conviction. Stylistically, however, the work is uneven. The book’s installment structure and occasional digressions betray its origins as a series of blog posts, most notably a chapter composed almost entirely of quotations. Still, Elefante’s voice remains consistently direct and insistent throughout, carrying readers through denser conceptual passages. Ultimately, the book’s blend of Buddhist philosophy, Christian ethics, and civic theory coalesces into a coherent, if idealistic, vision of democratic life rooted in interdependence.
A thoughtful and morally driven work that urges readers to rethink both their politics and their roles in public life.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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