A vigorous takedown of a supposed moral exemplar.
Thoroughgoing exposé of the Boy Scouts’ long-unacknowledged history of sexual abuse and subsequent bankruptcy.
Working with a fellow reporter, Christensen knocked on doors and examined hidden archives in order to find himself “peering into a Pandora’s box of sexual abuse involving thousands of Boy Scouts victimized by their leaders and betrayed by the nation’s preeminent youth group.” That number grew as advocacy groups, formed along the lines of support groups for victims of clerical abuse, entered a complex legal fray: In the end, some 82,000 former Boy Scouts sued, and to date, Christensen writes, the adjudicated payout has amounted to a mere $7.9 million. He writes that the Boy Scouts had long known of sexual abusers among the ranks of its adult leaders, keeping files, most recently, on more than 5,000 “ineligible volunteers,” many of whom were nonetheless able to sign on as scoutmasters; these “IV files,” he adds, predominantly concerned cases of “perversion.” These secret files—“secret,” he writes, being a term the Scouts shun, preferring the legalistic “confidential”—are incomplete, since they were purged to ostensibly “protect the privacy of victims, witnesses, and anyone falsely accused of sexual abuse.” As the instances of provable sexual abuse grew, Christensen writes, the Scouts lost a huge number of members, despite the organization’s reversal of long-standing prohibitions against gay and female Scouts (agnostics and atheists still need not apply)—a reversal that in turn cost the organization the support of the Mormon church, the leading contributor of both Scouts and money, such that “425,000 Mormon Boy Scouts had decamped, likely never to return.” Though the Scouts’ parent organization tested many legal maneuvers, the courts finally ruled against the group, forcing bankruptcy—even though, Christensen reckons, it still has “net assets of nearly $1 billion.”
A vigorous takedown of a supposed moral exemplar.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538726730
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
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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