A rigorous, moving book about gun violence in American schools.
A sobering guide to avoiding the tragedy of school shootings written by a librarian with personal connections to the topic.
Aponte’s book alternates among a few different modes: analysis of statistical information, direct advice, memoir, and interviews with activists. The analysis forms the heart of the book. The statistics are drawn from the author’s own substantial body of research, which covers 1,204 American school shootings from 1990 through 2019. He identifies the most common weapons used in school shootings (handguns), the motives behind school shootings (usually arguments and disputes), warning signs (often found in journals and online activity), and the relative safety of various locations within a school (most shootings take place outside.) Aponte also discusses common myths and misunderstandings about school shootings, including the ambiguity of the very definition of “mass shooting”; Aponte suggests using the term to describe “an incident in which at least four individuals are shot with a firearm, either injured or killed, including any alleged shooter(s) who may also have been shot during or immediately after the incident” (the author hopes that it will be easier to address mass shootings if we allow ourselves to see how pervasive they are). The early sections of the book are more personal: Aponte talks about his relationship with guns as both an Army brat and an airman in the U.S. Air Force, and he discusses his connection to gun-related tragedy—Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School is his alma mater (though he attended many years before the shooting there), and his sister died by suicide using a gun. Referring to his own experiences throughout the text, the author renders the difficult material more engaging and resonant. The work is thoroughly researched, and Aponte makes an appeal for gun safety that will be difficult to ignore, even across political lines. Some of the writing is a little clunky—the paragraphs don’t always flow well, and the author overuses hypothetical situations to make his points. Still, the research, analysis, and heart that went into it make this short book well worth reading and sharing.
A rigorous, moving book about gun violence in American schools.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2026
ISBN: 9798991098953
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Owl & Scroll Publishers
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
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
BOOK REVIEW
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