Haunting eyewitness accounts of one of the decade’s most catastrophic events.
A collection of intimate stories about the Israeli victims in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
With contributions from Cohen, Haaretz journalist Yaron has interviewed countless people and their families to craft this moving look at the lives and harrowing deaths of Israelis and guest workers on 10/7. The author alternates the heartbreaking, immediate profiles with some history of Israel as well as of the kibbutzim, the small activist, agricultural communities where many of the victims were struck. “The terrorists of Hamas murdered and destroyed the very communities that did more than any others to promote peace between the two peoples,” she writes. Moreover, in story after story, Yaron relates how many victims of 10/7 descended from Holocaust survivors or had moved to Israel for their safety. Beginning with Sderot, she notes how this southern city of immigrants has suffered from Hamas’ onslaught of rockets for many years and how 50 of its citizens were killed on 10/7. A group of elders on a minibus to a Dead Sea resort, many of whom were refugees from the Soviet satellite states, were gunned down on the streets; in Ofakim, one of Israel’s poorest cities, 49 residents were murdered. The author visited Bedouin communities in the Negev, where missiles rained down on the vulnerable residents, as well as the Kibbutz Alumim, where a group of Nepalese students working the fields were killed. The most horrendous toll of all was the 364 people murdered at the Nova music festival site (another 40 were kidnapped). “In the minds of many Israelis, including leading politicians,” writes Yaron, “disengagement from Gaza was the original sin, and a direct line connects Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the strip to the far-right Judicial Reform and massacre eighteen years later.”
Haunting eyewitness accounts of one of the decade’s most catastrophic events.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781250366283
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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