A sober, knowledgeable scholarly analysis of a timely issue.
The far-reaching consequences of abortion activism.
Legal historian Ziegler, who has documented the complexities of the abortion debate in several previous books, revisits the growth of the anti-abortion campaign with a focus on its impact on the Supreme Court, connection to campaign finance laws, and shaping of the contemporary political scene. After a brief overview of medical and legal arguments about abortion beginning in the mid-19th century, the author traces the controversy over right to life versus right to privacy that culminated in the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. After the court upheld Roe in 1992, activism shifted from local candidates to the national scene, focused on supporting presidential aspirants who would appoint conservative justices to the court. Campaign finance reform became part of that effort because limiting contributions made it difficult for advocacy groups to exert influence. The anti-abortion movement, therefore, saw an advantage in doing away with campaign finance limits, which, its lawyers argued, were equal to “restrictions on political speech.” Republicans have seen the issue of judicial nominees as a way to energize base voters, and they welcomed campaign finance deregulation to fill their coffers. However, as Ziegler shows, both alliances have weakened the GOP, opening the door to well-funded populists and fostering the party polarization that allows extremists, whom the party previously would have sidelined, to flourish. Ziegler’s deeply researched analysis draws on histories of the anti-abortion and abortion-rights movements, media reports, archival sources, legal decisions, and interviews—notably with James Bopp Jr., an Indiana lawyer at the forefront of anti-abortion strategy—to argue persuasively that the political complexities of abortion activism threaten democracy. Overturning Roe, and leaving abortion law up to individual states, is not the end goal of the anti-abortion movement; rather, activists are striving for a constitutional amendment that will outlaw abortion nationally.
A sober, knowledgeable scholarly analysis of a timely issue.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-300-26014-4
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.
Enduring the unthinkable.
This memoir—the first by an Israeli taken captive by Hamas on October 7, 2023—chronicles the 491 days the author was held in Gaza. Confined to tunnels beneath war-ravaged streets, Sharabi was beaten, humiliated, and underfed. When he was finally released in February, he learned that Hamas had murdered his wife and two daughters. In the face of scarcely imaginable loss, Sharabi has crafted a potent record of his will to survive. The author’s ordeal began when Hamas fighters dragged him from his home, in a kibbutz near Gaza. Alongside others, he was held for months at a time in filthy subterranean spaces. He catalogs sensory assaults with novelistic specificity. Iron shackles grip his ankles. Broken toilets produce an “unbearable stink,” and “tiny white worms” swarm his toothbrush. He gets one meal a day, his “belly caving inward.” Desperate for more food, he stages a fainting episode, using a shaving razor to “slice a deep gash into my eyebrow.” Captors share their sweets while celebrating an Iranian missile attack on Israel. He and other hostages sneak fleeting pleasures, finding and downing an orange soda before a guard can seize it. Several times, Sharabi—51 when he was kidnapped—gives bracing pep talks to younger compatriots. The captives learn to control what they can, trading family stories and “lift[ing] water bottles like dumbbells.” Remarkably, there’s some levity. He and fellow hostages nickname one Hamas guard “the Triangle” because he’s shaped like a SpongeBob SquarePants character. The book’s closing scenes, in which Sharabi tries to console other hostages’ families while learning the worst about his own, are heartbreaking. His captors “are still human beings,” writes Sharabi, bravely modeling the forbearance that our leaders often lack.
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780063489790
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper Influence/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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