One of the best books in the growing library surrounding the 2020 election—must reading for politics observers.
A steely-eyed dissection of the Trumpian “stop the steal” conspiracy and its madcap fomenters.
Bowden is known for writing on war (Black Hawk Down) and crime (Killing Pablo). In this first-rate collaboration with journalist Teague, he combines both in examining the pitched battles mounted by Trump supporters to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The authors open with an incident when, in Atlanta, an overflowing urinal flooded a room below where ballots were being tallied; the count ceased and the ballots were placed in water-safe containers—only to be replaced, Trump supporters insisted, with ballots for Biden. The same was alleged to be true in other battleground states, including Nevada, Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, where, admittedly, a few mistakes occurred owing to confusion in procedures for mail-in ballots. Regarding these mistakes, the authors write, “In an ordinary election, they might result in an angry letter to a precinct captain. But this year, they, like the leaky urinal in Atlanta, were all going to become a big deal.” They were a big deal because Trump had bellowed for months that if he lost the election, it would be because the Democrats cheated—the same tactic he deployed in 2016 when he anticipated a defeat to Hillary Clinton. “Never in America’s history…had a losing presidential candidate argued that the whole nation had been swindled,” write Bowden and Teague, relying on intrepid on-the-ground reporting. Nonetheless, millions of Americans believed that it was rigged—though fewer than one might think, while meanwhile, millions more loyal Republicans (including the attorney for Maricopa County, Arizona, a son of Watergate mastermind G. Gordon Liddy) accepted the fact that Biden won. The fight will continue, write the authors, even as wise voices hopefully prevail, such as another GOP loyalist who commented, “Harm does come from witch hunts, even if you’re not a witch.”
One of the best books in the growing library surrounding the 2020 election—must reading for politics observers.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5995-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2022
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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