A well-argued, if disjointed, case for political and social healing in the U.S.
A retired director and producer’s case for restoring America’s fractured political landscape.
Dedicated “to everyone on the planet who wishes we could start all over again,” this book calls for a return to “common sense, reason, and compromise.” Using the past six years as a lens through which to view America’s fracturing, Emery’s guide focuses on the major themes of the Trump era, which continue to reverberate even after the president’s 2020 electoral defeat. In addition to chapter-length overviews of major events, such as Black Lives Matter protests, Covid-19, and the January 6 insurrection, Emery also examines broader questions about America’s future, from changing demographics and social media to “the loss of civility” and threats to democracy. Though the book’s center-left approach may irk ideological detractors on the right, it offers reasoned and informed takes that are supported by solid research. Admirably, the author follows his own advice in his critiques of politicians, particularly those inside Donald Trump’s populist circles, focusing on their policies and actions rather than resorting to ad hominem attacks or straw-man arguments. While a return to “normalcy” is central to the book’s objective, it also doesn’t seek a return to a sanitized version of the past, arguing, “we cannot just wish all that has happened away.” With a career as a director and producer of feature length films, documentaries, and television shows, as well as postretirement publication of SF thrillers, Emery is a skilled storyteller with a gripping writing style that effectively distills the social, cultural, and political milieu of the last six years into less than 300 pages. The solid prose, however, sometimes includes an overabundance of quotes from classical literature, philosophy, and movies. While most of the quotes are poignant or provocative in isolation, their occurrence on nearly every page of text makes for a fragmented read that unnecessarily breaks up otherwise engrossing political commentary.
A well-argued, if disjointed, case for political and social healing in the U.S.Pub Date: June 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64456-445-5
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Indies United Publishing House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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