A tiresome recitation but just the thing for the Sinophobes in the audience.
Shrill denunciation of the cozy relationship America’s technological, financial, and political “elites” enjoy with China.
Name a prominent newsmaker, and Schweizer—who joined forces with Steve Bannon in 2012 to create the Government Accountability Institute, with financing by hedge fund manager Robert Mercer, of Cambridge Analytica infamy—finds a money trail leading to China. Recognizing that many of these wealthy and powerful individuals subscribed to the view that China would liberalize with the relaxation of government controls over the market, Schweizer counters that instead, Beijing “has become more aggressive and repressive.” China has always courted wealth-seekers from the West, who act as agents of technology transfer, lobbyists, and influencers. Not only is the Chinese government brutal, writes the author, but it has also committed to overtaking the U.S. economically by 2050. He adds, “American elites featured in this book are in various ways feeding the beast that would make this nightmare a reality.” Bill Gates, Nancy Pelosi, Hunter and Joe Biden, Tony Blinken, and Mitch McConnell are among the figures Schweizer indignantly calls to account as agents of America’s demise. The author clearly comes from the right—the first person he thanks in his acknowledgments is Parler/Breitbart News funder Rebekah Mercer—but that doesn’t keep him from including a few Trump administration officials in his rogues’ gallery, including ambassador to China Terry Branstad and former transportation secretary Elaine Chao. Still, it’s telling that much of his fire is aimed at the Bush family, from both Georges to Neil and Jeb, all anathema to the Trump set, and that Trump himself gets a pass—despite all his wheeling and dealing with and admiration for totalitarian regimes up and down the Silk Road. “Whether the reader likes [Trump] or not,” writes the author, “there can be little doubt that he saw the challenge posed by China clearly and moved America in a positive direction to confront it.”
A tiresome recitation but just the thing for the Sinophobes in the audience.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-321169-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
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
The choir is sure to enjoy this impassioned preaching on familiar progressive themes.
Essays on current political topics by a high-profile actor and activist.
Milano explains in an introduction that she began writing this uneven collection while dealing with a severe case of Covid-19 and suffering from "persistent brain fog.” In the first essay, "On Being Unapologetically Fucked Up,” the author begins by fuming over a February 2019 incident in which she compared MAGA caps worn by high school kids to KKK hoods. She then runs through a grab bag of flash-point news items (police shootings, border crimes, sexual predators in government), deploying the F-bomb with abandon and concluding, "What I know is that fucked up is as fundamental a state of the world as night and day. But I know there is better. I know that ‘less fucked up’ is a state we can live in.” The second essay, "Believe Women," discusses Milano’s seminal role in the MeToo movement; unfortunately, it is similarly conversational in tone and predictable in content. One of the few truly personal essays, "David," about the author's marriage, refutes the old saw about love meaning never having to say you're sorry, replacing it with "Love means you can suggest a national sex strike and your husband doesn't run away screaming." Milano assumes, perhaps rightly, that her audience is composed of followers and fans; perhaps these readers will know what she is talking about in the seemingly allegorical "By Any Other Name," about her bad experience with a certain rosebush. "Holy shit, giving birth sucked," begins one essay. "Words are weird, right?" begins the next. "Welp, this is going to piss some of you off. Hang in there," opens a screed about cancel culture—though she’s entirely correct that “it’s childish, divisive, conceited, and Trumpian to its core.” By the end, however, Milano's intelligence, compassion, integrity, and endurance somewhat compensate for her lack of literary polish.
The choir is sure to enjoy this impassioned preaching on familiar progressive themes.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18329-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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