A wide-ranging if inessential collection of newsletter essays.
Gruner muses on the ways in which history repeats itself in this collection of essays culled from his Substack.
It’s tempting to think of the forces that move our world as abstract concepts—trends, movements, ideologies. When the author set out to write his newsletter, however, he took a more human-scaled perspective. “I’ve focused on ideas surrounding economics, technology, and public health,” he writes in his introduction. “But it’s events, and even more so, people, that make life interesting.” Writing on the financial structure of the ride-share giant Uber, Gruner centers his essay around the working conditions of one specific driver, an immigrant he identifies as “MK” who does his best to net $200 a day after the company takes its share of his earnings. The book’s 54 essays represent a year’s worth of articles Gruner wrote and published for his Substack. The author’s favored structure is to provide a historical perspective on some current event by writing about a moment in the past that mirrors our present. The occasion of Donald Trump’s trade war inspires a piece about how, in the 1960s, a German tariff on American chickens led Americans to place a responding tariff on German “light trucks,” which over the decades has influenced the status of the American-made pickup truck. “Shielded from foreign competition, the American pickup has evolved from a pedestrian work vehicle to a symbol of America itself: powerful, rugged, and confident,” writes Gruner. Trump’s attempts to buy Greenland offer the author the opportunity to discuss the history of that island and his own 2018 vacation there with his wife, complete with full-color photographs. Presidential history and the Covid-19 pandemic, about which Gruner has published other books, are frequent topics for the essays.
The author is compelling when offering the reader insights into the lesser-known histories of various problems or institutions, like the origins and longtime neglect of the air traffic control system. Here, he describes America’s first air traffic controlman, Archie League, of the St. Louis Lambert Airport: “Archie’s ‘control tower’ was a wooden wheelbarrow which held a lawn chair, beach umbrella, his lunch box, and two large flags: a checkered flag and a red flag. Based on the wind, Archie would roll his wheelbarrow to the end of the active runway.” Gruner has not done much to shape these essays into a cohesive work, and some posts feel a bit like the author is phoning them in. “Measuring President Trump’s First 100 Days in Office” simply reprints the first few paragraphs of eight news organizations’ appraisals of the beginning of Trump’s second term. “ChatGPT Analyzes Joe Biden and Donald Trump” is merely the transcript of an exchange Gruner had with the large language model about the two presidents. In “President Trump Declares COVID a National Emergency,” the author uses the five-year anniversary of the Covid-19 outbreak to briefly promote his own book, COVID Wars (2025); he even includes a QR code. Perhaps devoted fans of the author’s Substack will appreciate this volume, but most readers can likely make do with the Substack itself.
A wide-ranging if inessential collection of newsletter essays.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9781737823193
Page Count: 362
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
