The thesis is unremarkable, but Fronczak’s study of the Spanish Civil War has considerable merit.
Scholarly examination of the relationship between anti-fascism and fascism, each contingent on the other.
Princeton historian Fronczak points out that our consensus view of what the left constitutes largely hinges on convergences of the 1930s. “Antifascism was the central idea pulling the left together in the years leading up to the Spanish Civil War,” he writes, “and then pushing leftists to go to Spain to fight together there.” There had been fascist movements in the decade before, including the 400 black shirts who marched in New York City in 1927, and opposition to them. While the face of fascism has changed—globalized, Fronczak writes, in its encounters with populist and nationalist movements around the world—its existence has served constantly to reenergize the left. It is hardly a novel idea that fascism is an overworked term defined variously from individual points of view, but the better part of this book is the author’s study of Spain as crucible. Fronczak corrects some points of Cold War ideology—e.g., that the Popular Front was a creation of the Comintern; it dates, he argues, to an earlier coalition on the French-German border “determined to win regional autonomy for the Alsatian people,” some of whose members were renegade Communists going against the party line. The author also highlights figures who have fallen into obscurity, such as the Black American fighter Oliver Law, who, born on a ranch in Texas, became a militant anti-fascist commander in Spain, where, despite official claims of equality, he was often tested on account of his race. “Right, left, fascism, and antifascism—these have all become once more words that people find worth fighting over,” Fronczak notes in closing. His book is a touch arid, but if nothing else, one hopes that it will send readers to wider accounts of the Spanish Civil War—by, for instance, Hugh Thomas or Antony Beevor—to deepen their knowledge.
The thesis is unremarkable, but Fronczak’s study of the Spanish Civil War has considerable merit.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-300-25117-3
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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
SEEN & HEARD
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.
Atlanticsenior 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
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