A visceral, graphic report from dystopia.
Confessions of a Zoneaholic.
Ukrainian writer Kamysh makes his book debut with a raw account of his journeys as an illegal tourist—“a stalker, a walker, a tracker, an idiot”—in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, the bleak area surrounding the site of the 1986 disaster at a nuclear power plant in Ukraine. His father, a civil engineer, had been a liquidator at the site for six weeks, “when you could still get fried by radiation.” Now Kamysh, and those he guides, see the Zone as a destination for grungy adventures. In abandoned towns “overtaken by desolation and death,” they go to “guzzle down cheap vodka, smash windows with empty bottles, curse way too loudly and do other things that distinguish living towns from dead ones.” Kamysh paints a picture—and includes his own photographs—of a stark, surreal landscape: empty apartments where he finds syringes and dead animals (including the rotting corpse of a wolf); crumbling houses with moss-covered roofs; and bars “where smugglers, looters, and border guards all booze together.” Although he repeatedly vows never to step foot in the Zone again, he cannot resist its allure. He has gone to the Zone in the dead of winter, stomping into an endless blizzard, freezing through the night. “We know how stupid our escapades are,” Kamysh writes, but his own motivation is not merely to experience extreme tourism. He revels in a feeling of “true alienation: treading unfamiliar paths and sinking into swamps without a compass or a map, looking up at the stars you know nothing about.” In sparsely repopulated villages and secluded borderlands, following the paths of smugglers looking for scrap metal, Kamysh admits he is looking for “something unattainable”—an antidote, perhaps, to complacency and consumerism. Illegal tourists revive dead cities. “They breathe life into the empty shells of fragile houses” and make the Zone “a place worth living for.” Translators Leliv and Costigan-Humes capture Kamysh’s angry, sometimes hauntingly rueful prose.
A visceral, graphic report from dystopia.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-66260-127-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Astra House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
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