A vivid and affecting reimagining of both reportage and how its consumers are called to relate to its content.
A reporter searches for a richer framework for covering international crises.
Having spent her career documenting tragedies of war, oppression, and instability, Hayden offers this collection of unlikely love stories to counter a “specific kind of detachment crisis going on.” Romantic partners disperse along Ukraine’s front lines and celebrate weddings in Iraq, former child soldiers return to their families in Uganda, and children orphaned by genocide in Rwanda build “artificial families” with other survivors. Across current conflicts, the aftermath of older ones, and the beleaguered landscapes where lines between “current” and “aftermath” are blurred, couples, families, and communities show interest in, commitment to, and care for each other that is both twisted and enhanced by persistent hunger, the hum of weaponized drones, and the vigilance survival requires. In these contexts, the rush of new love can be misinterpreted as spying, and celebratory gunshots are assumed to be violent clashes. Hayden does not skimp on harsh details or obscure their attendant horror and grief but rather uses them to throw into relief the stubborn and expansive nature of love. She carries readers into both familiar front-page issues and the underreported shading of this terrain, like the tension between the leaders of northern Nigeria’s ruthless Boko Haram and their ISIS counterparts or the collapse of the Lebanese banking system in the wake of civil war. Behind each geopolitical struggle lie not just individual humans but entire webs of human relationships. Hayden began her project to atone for her contributions to a media topography that co-opts despair for sensational hooks. But the resulting text is much greater than personal amends; rather, it extricates human stories from headlines that numb us to violence and struggle and imbues those stories with courageous complexity and compassion.
A vivid and affecting reimagining of both reportage and how its consumers are called to relate to its content.Pub Date: June 16, 2026
ISBN: 9781668034620
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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