An authoritative and intelligent portrait of the global spread of authoritarianism and its dangers.
A distinguished fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace sounds an alarm about the worldwide rise of authoritarian leaders.
After arguing in The End of Power that global institutions are finding it harder to win respect, Naím, the former editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy, makes a good case that leaders who gain power increasingly use autocratic strategies he calls the 3Ps: “populism, polarization, and post-truth.” His thesis isn’t new, but what sets his work apart from books like Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny and Michiko Kakutani’s The Death of Truth is its unusually comprehensive armada of facts about the international drift over the past two decades toward authoritarian leaders, whether old-style dictators like Kim Jong Un or nominally elected presidents like Vladimir Putin. The pandemic has posed unprecedented openings for power grabs: Xi Jinping cracked down on ethnic Uyghurs in China, Viktor Orbán shut down Parliament in Hungary, Rodrigo Duterte was granted near-unlimited emergency powers in the Philippines, and other countries have seen similarly repressive moves. In one of many startling but well-documented examples, Naím notes that a European Union report found that Russia used social media bots “to try to worsen the crisis the pandemic would generate for its adversaries in Europe,” typically by undermining confidence in democracies’ emergency response. Other tactics used for years by Russia—along with North Korea, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia—include the creation of GONGOs, government-operated fake NGOs, to thwart the work of democracies. Naím’s solutions to the new authoritarianism tend toward blue-sky visions, and his repeated use of the term “3P autocrats” is perhaps too clever for his urgent message (as in the Disney-fied chapter title “The 3P Autocrats Go Global”). But his book offers a chilling confirmation of a trend many readers will have sensed instinctively: A growing number of countries have achieved or are moving toward “outright kakistocracy: rule by the very worst a society has to offer.”
An authoritative and intelligent portrait of the global spread of authoritarianism and its dangers.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27920-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An important dialogue at a fraught time, emphasizing mutual candor, curiosity, and respect.
Two bestselling authors engage in an enlightening back-and-forth about Jewishness and antisemitism.
Acho, author of Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man, and Tishby, author of Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth, discuss many of the searing issues for Jews today, delving into whether Jewishness is a religion, culture, ethnicity, or community—or all of the above. As Tishby points out, unlike in Christianity, one can be comfortably atheist and still be considered a Jew. She defines Judaism as a “big tent” religion with four main elements: religion, peoplehood, nationhood, and the idea of tikkun olam (“repairing the world through our actions”). She addresses candidly the hurtful stereotypes about Jews (that they are rich and powerful) that Acho grew up with in Dallas and how Jews internalize these antisemitic judgments. Moreover, Tishby notes, “it is literally impossible to be Jewish and not have any connection with Israel, and I’m not talking about borders or a dot on the map. Judaism…is an indigenous religion.” Acho wonders if one can legitimately criticize “Jewish people and their ideologies” without being antisemitic, and Tishby offers ways to check whether one’s criticism of Jews or Zionism is antisemitic or factually straightforward. The authors also touch on the deteriorating relationship between Black and Jewish Americans, despite their historically close alliance during the civil rights era. “As long as Jewish people get to benefit from appearing white while Black people have to suffer for being Black, there will always be resentment,” notes Acho. “Because the same thing that grants you all access—your skin color—is what grants us pain and punishment in perpetuity.” Finally, the authors underscore the importance of being mutual allies, and they conclude with helpful indexes on vernacular terms and customs.
An important dialogue at a fraught time, emphasizing mutual candor, curiosity, and respect.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781668057858
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon Element
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A welcome call to grow up and cut out the whining.
The New York Times columnist serves up a cogent argument for shelving the grudge and sucking it up.
In 1976, Tom Wolfe described the “me decade” as a pit of mindless narcissism. A half century later, Bruni, author of Born Round and other bestselling books, calls for a renaming: “‘Me Turning Point’ would have been more accurate, because the period of time since has been a nonstop me jamboree.” Our present cultural situation, he notes, is marked by constant grievance and endless grasping. The ensuing blame game has its pros. Donald Trump, he notes, “became a victor by playing the victim, and his most impassioned oratory, such as it was, focused not on the good that he could do for others but on the bad supposedly done to him.” Bruni is an unabashed liberal, and while he places most of the worst behavior on the right—he opens with Sean Hannity’s bleating lie that the Biden administration was diverting scarce baby formula from needy Americans to illegal immigrants—he also allows that the left side of the aisle has committed its share of whining. A case in point: the silencing of a professor for showing an image of Mohammed to art students, neither religiously proscribed nor done without ample warning, but complained about by self-appointed student censors. Still, “not all grievances are created equal,” he writes. “There is January 6, 2021, and there is everything else. Attempts by leaders on the right to minimize what happened that day and lump it together with protests on the left are as ludicrous as they are dangerous.” Whether from left or right, Bruni calls for a dose of humility on the part of all: “an amalgam of kindness, openness, and silliness might be an effective solvent for grievance.”
A welcome call to grow up and cut out the whining.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781668016435
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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