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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
