A timely and accessible political commentary that draws on Talmudic wisdom.
A Jewish American activist looks to his faith for ways to remedy America’s political divisions.
Daniels made national headlines during the 2016 and 2020 presidential election cycles with his distribution of tailor-made red and blue kippahs (also known as yarmulkes) for supporters of the Republican and Democratic candidates. Careful to reach out to all sides, including supporters of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, the author sought to spread a message of peace and reconciliation; the inside of each kippah featured a nonpartisan prayer for Muslims, Christians, and Jews to “weed out hate.” They were part of a national movement that Daniels led, which he surveys in his previous book, Weed Out Hate: Plant a Rose (2020). The author is the grandson of the inventor of the Ross Root Feeder, a popular horticultural tool, and he uses the invention as an extended spiritual metaphor throughout both books. Just as his family’s business centered on nurturing rosebushes and trees “at the deepest roots,” so, too, does Daniels see his kippah-distribution movement as one that has spread nutrients of peace and cooperation. At its best, the book blends an account of the author’s spiritual vision with a campaign memoir that recounts his interactions with some of the nation’s leading politicians. Vice President Mike Pence, Daniels notes, posted a picture on Twitter of himself hugging the author, and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, he says, insisted on calling him “Rabbi,” despite his insistence that the title didn’t apply to him.
The author also openly admits to the initial naïveté that infused his movement, noting that he’d long been “fascinated” by Trump as a fan of his NBC TV show The Apprentice. During Trump’s first run, Daniels presented the Republican candidate with 50 gold hats that featured the words “Donald Trump 2016” in Hebrew and English; Trump said “I love it” and asked that Daniels give them to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The author now describes his interactions with the Trump campaign as “dancing with the devil,” and he relates his appearances at Trump’s campaign rallies as reminiscent of his own visits to the Dachau concentration camp; he also compares one of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels’ speeches and “today’s right-wing ideologies.” In this book, he offers an alternative vision (“Making America Kosher Again”) that blends Kabbalah mysticism and the “deepest roots of the Torah” to offer a spiritual vision that turns Trump’s campaign slogan, Make America Great Again, “on its head” by encouraging civic prayer and collective intentions for “cultural unification.” Despite the book’s dire assessment of contemporary Republicans, the author is relentlessly positive in his belief in civic transformation. This belief in the fundamental goodness of humanity may be refreshing to readers tired of cynicism, but it may strike others as overly optimistic. Still, Daniels is effective at making his argument, and he approaches this brief book with an enthusiastic writing style. The engaging narrative is complemented by a wealth of full-color photographs of political figures, credited to various photographers. A timely and accessible political commentary that draws on Talmudic wisdom.Pub Date: July 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781977261502
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
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
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