Sure to be controversial, as books about Middle Eastern policy tend to be, but a welcome, well-informed contribution.
A focused look at the obdurate problem of Palestinian-Israeli relations and the Americans on both sides of the issue.
Media studies scholar Hill and Middle East foreign policy specialist Plitnick open with an example of what might appear to be contradictory stances among American progressives: outrage at the Trump administration’s immigration policy yet apparent silence when, soon after Trump deployed soldiers to the southern border, that administration cut off funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which “provides emergency food, shelter, medication, supplies, and medication to millions of Palestinian refugees living in the West Bank, Gaza, and camps in neighboring countries.” There was hardly any policy discussion on the matter, and those few progressives who did raise objections went unheeded. The Obama administration, note the authors, was little more concerned with Palestinian human rights issues, and, they add, things are likely to get worse. Gaza in particular is projected to be uninhabitable soon, and those who live there do so under the baleful eye of the Israeli military and a government that, in 2018, declared that “only Jews can exercise national self-determination in Israel.” The authors argue that human rights should become the “primary predicate for U.S. policy in the region.” They also examine the efficacy of various means of Palestinian resistance, winning no diplomatic points for nonviolence, even as Israel continues to view the situation as a zero-sum game: “Peaceful coexistence, while not entirely ruled out, is seen as too risky a gamble.” In their clear and evenhanded analysis, the authors conclude that progressives must work to dismantle injustices, many of which are perpetuated by the U.S. government, and in turn, to hold the Israeli government “accountable for its actions in the region, and especially for its denial of basic rights to Palestinians.”
Sure to be controversial, as books about Middle Eastern policy tend to be, but a welcome, well-informed contribution.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-62097-592-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.
A deeply informed critique of the malicious initiatives currently using gender as a political tool to arouse fear and strengthen political and religious institutions.
In their latest book, following The Force of Nonviolence, Butler, the noted philosopher and gender studies scholar, documents and debunks the anti-gender ideology of the right, the core principle of which is that male and female are natural categories whose recognition is essential for the survival of the family, nations, and patriarchal order. Its proponents reject “sex” as a malleable category infused with prior political and cultural understandings. By turning gender into a “phantasmatic scene,” they enable those in positions of authority to deflect attention from such world-destroying forces as war, predatory capitalism, and climate change. Butler explores the ideology’s presence in the U.S., the U.K., Uganda, and Hungary, countries where legislation has limited the rights of trans and homosexual people and denied them their sexual identity. The author also delves into the ideology’s roots among Evangelicals and the Catholic Church and such political leaders as Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán. Butler is particularly bothered by trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who treat trans women as “male predators in disguise.” For the author, “the gap between the perceived or lived body and prevailing social norms can never be fully closed.” They imagine “a world where the many relations to being socially embodied that exist become more livable” and calls for alliances across differences and “a radical democracy informed by socialist values.” Butler compensates for the thinness of some of their recommendations with an astute dissection of the ideology’s core ideas and impressive grasp of its intellectual pretensions. This is a wonderfully thoughtful and impassioned book on a critically important centerpiece of contemporary authoritarianism and patriarchy.
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780374608224
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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
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