A timely exploration of how the unthinkable becomes normal.
A playbook for totalitarianism with echoes in today’s headlines.
British historian and documentarian Rees opens by recounting a meeting with an unrepentant veteran of the Waffen SS, who believed that the Nazi regime had marked a golden age in German history and that “the Jews had been a ‘problem’ that had to be dealt with ‘one way or another.’” It is exceedingly difficult, Rees holds, to shake true believers from beliefs that, however evil or misbegotten, help separate “them” from “us,” speaking to the fundamental instinct of humans to form in-groups and then identify others as members of out-groups. Hitler was a master of mass psychology, and he began with the chillingly familiar deployment of conspiracy theories, helped along by German exceptionalism: Our army was made up of the world’s best soldiers, the thinking went, and so it must have been the fault of some enemy within that we lost World War I. Though Hitler probably didn’t know the physiology involved, Rees credits him with knowing how to play the amygdala to incite anxiety and fear, further dividing the German people into us-and-them tribes. Other factors that shaped the “Nazi mind” included the certainty of the political and financial elites that they could control Hitler; the omnipresence of officially sanctioned protection rackets; the exploitation of racial animus and privileging of “pure” Germans; and the leveraging of religion to provide legitimacy for state authoritarianism. Altogether, providing the necessary substitutions, the phenomena Rees describes are depressingly familiar, and signs of that fearful, vengeful, all-destructive mind are all around. As Rees observes, meaningfully, “Everything is more fragile than we think. That is the central message that I have taken from my work.” It is, and it’s the takeaway from this book as well.
A timely exploration of how the unthinkable becomes normal.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781541702332
Page Count: 464
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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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