Essential for understanding the right-wing rage that boils across America.
A war correspondent provides a crucial account of the events leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt.
“While they demonstrated their ability to attempt an insurrection…I have a hard time crediting them with the imagination necessary to conceive of one,” writes Mogelson, New Yorker staffer and winner of two National Magazine and two George Polk Awards, referring to the Proud Boys and other right-wing radicals who stormed the Capitol. The orders for that insurrection came from elsewhere, as a congressional investigation is now unveiling. Mogelson examines the uprising as the expression of a kind of free-floating White rage that he has been tracing over the last few years. His reporting has taken him to places such as Michigan, where, in 2020, thousands of Trump supporters, anti-vaxxers, and other dissidents attempted to shut down the state capitol while others plotted to kidnap and perhaps even kill the state’s Democratic governor, who “had recently extended a stay-at-home order and imposed additional restrictions on commerce and recreation.” The Covid-19 pandemic was one spark, along with “a raging blizzard of propaganda [that] would completely blot out reality.” The reality that Mogelson presents is unrelentingly bleak, culminating in a vivid, and frightening, blow-by-blow account of the assault on the Capitol, which he witnessed firsthand. By not declaring himself a member of the press, he was able to move among figures such as the so-called QAnon Shaman, “who was carrying out a highly specific and consequential mission, from which he would not be deterred”—namely, to reclaim the Capitol for God by bellowing “shamanic songs” to activate the electromagnetic ley lines along which D.C. was supposedly built. (His mission ultimately ended in a sentence of 41 months in prison.) Other participants were much less woo-woo, of course, earnest in their mission to overturn the election and, in the bargain, hang Mike Pence for upholding the Constitution. Mogelson recounts the chaos in consistently striking, memorable detail.
Essential for understanding the right-wing rage that boils across America.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-48921-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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