An often engaging and readable account of UFO lore, but one that won’t convince skeptics.
In their debut collaboration, UFO enthusiasts Heckenlively and Mazzola offer an account of aliens and government coverups.
The author’s story begins in the same place it ends—during U.S. congressional hearings on unidentified flying objects (aka unidentified arial phenomena) in July 2023. At these hearings, former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch made headlines when he testified that alien corpses existed on U.S. military bases and that this state of affairs was common knowledge in the intelligence community. In the remainder of the book, the authors discuss a highly detailed series of scenarios that will be familiar to readers who know about the standard UFO narrative: that alien spacecraft have crash-landed on Earth many times, that other aliens continue to visit the planet, and that their existence is known to a secret cabal of world leaders (the “deep state” of the book’s subtitle) who’ve suppressed that knowledge for decades while “reverse-engineering” alien technology from crash sites. They review a number of familiar events, including the alleged alien-spaceship crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, and the claimed alien abduction of Betty and Barney Hill in New Hampshire in 1961, among others. Throughout, they frequently reference other UFO enthusiasts, such as Steven Greer (who hosts a podcast with Mazzola). They also ask broader questions related to UFO theories, such as “would the reality of alien intervention in human development destroy our faith in both God and science?”
Over the course of 300 pages, Heckenlively and Mazzola write with energy and intelligence, and it makes for a work that newcomers to the topic may find engaging. They even periodically broaden the conversation to epistemic dimensions: “Does it genuinely matter whether one is a skeptic or a believer in UFOs?” they ask at one point. “What seems clear to both sides is that something important is being kept from us.” In general, the work is likely to appeal most to fellow UFO aficionados who may already agree with many of its assertions. However, the book presents theories without convincing evidence. For example, it tells of Peruvian mummies “with three toes and three fingers, who appear to be genetic hybrids using the DNA of humans, chimpanzees, and something else,” but leaps to a conclusion, without proof, that they must have genetically engineered by aliens. At another point, the book states that President Bill Clinton was “consistently denied access” to intelligence agency information about UFOs, but the president never said this, which the authors note earlier on: “Perhaps we’re reading between the lines but Clinton appears to be saying that nobody definitively told him there were no alien bodies or technology in our possession.” The authors’ theories about humanity’s past also seem based on assumptions, as when they ask, “When we look at the horrors of human history, might we blame at least some of it on the aliens—who, after giving us intelligence, quickly took us into bondage and slavery?”
An often engaging and readable account of UFO lore, but one that won’t convince skeptics.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9798895651186
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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