Of interest to military planners as well as workers in the humanitarian aid/NGO sphere.
Sociological exploration of the role of child soldiers in nonstate military operations.
The use of children in combat was once fairly uncommon, but groups such as the Islamic State and the Tamil Tigers have been systematic in putting young people in the field. In some cases, write Bloom (Communication/Georgia State Univ.; Bombshell: Women and Terrorism, 2011, etc.) and Horgan (Global Studies/Georgia State Univ.; The Psychology of Terrorism, 2014, etc.), the children are forced or coerced to bear arms, while in others, their parents sign them up, whether because they are believers in the cause or because, in the case of IS in places like Syria and Iraq, they receive a stipend for it. Sometimes the children are even willing participants. One 13-year-old Iranian boy who became the first suicide bomber to die in 1980 was hailed as a hero, and “his death was likened to the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammed’s grandson Hussein (killed at Karbala) and was celebrated by the Ayatollah Khomeini.” Drawing on a wide body of case studies, the authors examine the many ways child soldiers are drawn into their roles—which, in the end, usually turn out to be as cannon fodder. “Child soldiers…are not recruited for the future, but for the present,” they write. “Most die in battle and only a handful ever progress through the ranks to become adult leaders.” In action, too, child soldiers tend to be deadly, making up in savagery what they lack in experience. Can a child, once impressed into the military, ever escape? It happens, write the authors, as sometimes they are thrown out for incompetence, and others run away: “The reality is that most terrorist groups do permit disengagement, to a degree." Even so, they note, accounts by such disengaged children are rare. Bloom and Horgan close with white-paper recommendations for policymakers on how to deal with child soldiers—e.g., “Engage the families and communities of child returnees to better facilitate their reintegration.”
Of interest to military planners as well as workers in the humanitarian aid/NGO sphere.Pub Date: May 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8014-5388-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Cornell Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
No one’s mind will be changed by Karl’s book, but it’s a valuable report from the scene of an ongoing train wreck.
The chief White House and Washington correspondent for ABC provides a ringside seat to a disaster-ridden Oval Office.
It is Karl to whom we owe the current popularity of a learned Latin term. Questioning chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, he followed up a perhaps inadvertently honest response on the matter of Ukrainian intervention in the electoral campaign by saying, “What you just described is a quid pro quo.” Mulvaney’s reply: “Get over it.” Karl, who has been covering Trump for decades and knows which buttons to push and which to avoid, is not inclined to get over it: He rightly points out that a reporter today “faces a president who seems to have no appreciation or understanding of the First Amendment and the role of a free press in American democracy.” Yet even against a bellicose, untruthful leader, he adds, the press “is not the opposition party.” The author, who keeps his eye on the subject and not in the mirror, writes of Trump’s ability to stage situations, as when he once called Trump out, at an event, for misrepresenting poll results and Trump waited until the camera was off before exploding, “Fucking nasty guy!”—then finished up the interview as if nothing had happened. Trump and his inner circle are also, by Karl’s account, masters of timing, matching negative news such as the revelation that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election with distractions away from Trump—in this case, by pushing hard on the WikiLeaks emails from the Democratic campaign, news of which arrived at the same time. That isn’t to say that they manage people or the nation well; one of the more damning stories in a book full of them concerns former Homeland Security head Kirstjen Nielsen, cut off at the knees even while trying to do Trump’s bidding.
No one’s mind will be changed by Karl’s book, but it’s a valuable report from the scene of an ongoing train wreck.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4562-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
A bold rallying cry that should help in the continuing fight for LGBTQ rights. Read alongside Baumann’s Love and Resistance...
A showcase of the work of activists and participants in the Stonewall uprising, published to coincide with the 50th anniversary.
With his discerning selections, editor Baumann (editor: Love and Resistance: Out of the Closet into the Stonewall Era, 2019, etc.)—assistant director for collection development for the New York Public Library and coordinator of the library’s LGBT Initiative—provides a street-level view of the Stonewall uprising, which helped launch the LGBTQ rights movement in the United States. Through his skillful curation, he offers a corrective for what is too often a sanitized, homogenous, and whitewashed portrayal of academics and professionals about the event sometimes termed “the hairpin drop heard around the world.” By gathering vibrant and varied experiences of diverse contributors, the collection reflects the economic, gender, racial, and ethnic complexity of the LGBTQ community at a time when behaviors such as same-sex dancing were criminalized. Featuring essays, interviews, personal accounts, and news articles, Baumann’s archival project accurately and meticulously captures an era of social unrest; the conversation about institutional discrimination and inequality presented here remains as revolutionary today as it did 50 years ago. The anthology invites us to look closely at the unresolved social dynamics of a population defined by its diversity, confronting sexism, racism, classism, and internalized homophobia alongside a broad view of institutional discrimination, heteronormativity, and sexual repression. Voices of significant leaders sit beside stories from participants behind protest lines, police raids, and street harassment, and the mounting frustration with an oppressive status quo becomes palpable on every page. The first-person narratives collected here effectively spotlight the social inequalities surrounding the LGBTQ community, many of which persist today.
A bold rallying cry that should help in the continuing fight for LGBTQ rights. Read alongside Baumann’s Love and Resistance and Marc Stein’s The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History for a full education on the events before, during, and after Stonewall.Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-14-313351-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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