An intelligent, persuasive book about events that are all too current.
How Osama bin Laden helped bring about not just 9/11, but also the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
Donald Trump, writes Daily Beast senior national security correspondent Ackerman, “understood something about the War on Terror that [others] did not”—namely, that underlying it was the view that the enemy comprised non-White groups and nations “from a hostile foreign civilization.” Read: Islam. Certainly, that’s how many Muslims read it, and though Trump decried America’s foreign wars, he did little to rein in the hyperactive military. Anti-Muslim sentiment long predated 9/11, but when the towers fell, the resulting “Forever War,” its targets almost exclusively Muslim, backfired. It was ill defined and essentially unwinnable, “intolerable for a people accustomed to thinking of itself as exceptional.” While that war was fought abroad, it reverberated powerfully at home, where a surveillance state developed that had unprecedented police powers and “an atmosphere of paranoia that frequently turned conspiratorial.” As Ackerman rightly points out, the paranoia was directed toward Muslims but also toward liberals who were presumed to coddle the enemy. It was pointedly not directed at the domestic right-wing terrorists who have worked just as much mischief as al-Qaida. Immediately after the tragedies at Ruby Ridge and Waco, the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre denounced federal agents in their “stormtrooper uniforms” as enemies of “law-abiding citizens,” a view very much in evidence today. Meanwhile, hate crimes against Muslims have steadily risen, fueled by nativism, evangelical zealotry, and racism, all of which congealed in the cynical MAGA movement, which brought the world the spectacle of the right-wing extremist invasion of the Capitol and ongoing attempts to declare Trump the winner of the 2020 election—even as the Trump administration branded peaceful protestors as insurrectionists. Ackerman capably connects seemingly disparate elements without forcing issues so that readers will see how such matters as the Branch Davidian siege of 1993 helped fuel White supremacist movements today.
An intelligent, persuasive book about events that are all too current.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-984879-77-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.
Enduring the unthinkable.
This memoir—the first by an Israeli taken captive by Hamas on October 7, 2023—chronicles the 491 days the author was held in Gaza. Confined to tunnels beneath war-ravaged streets, Sharabi was beaten, humiliated, and underfed. When he was finally released in February, he learned that Hamas had murdered his wife and two daughters. In the face of scarcely imaginable loss, Sharabi has crafted a potent record of his will to survive. The author’s ordeal began when Hamas fighters dragged him from his home, in a kibbutz near Gaza. Alongside others, he was held for months at a time in filthy subterranean spaces. He catalogs sensory assaults with novelistic specificity. Iron shackles grip his ankles. Broken toilets produce an “unbearable stink,” and “tiny white worms” swarm his toothbrush. He gets one meal a day, his “belly caving inward.” Desperate for more food, he stages a fainting episode, using a shaving razor to “slice a deep gash into my eyebrow.” Captors share their sweets while celebrating an Iranian missile attack on Israel. He and other hostages sneak fleeting pleasures, finding and downing an orange soda before a guard can seize it. Several times, Sharabi—51 when he was kidnapped—gives bracing pep talks to younger compatriots. The captives learn to control what they can, trading family stories and “lift[ing] water bottles like dumbbells.” Remarkably, there’s some levity. He and fellow hostages nickname one Hamas guard “the Triangle” because he’s shaped like a SpongeBob SquarePants character. The book’s closing scenes, in which Sharabi tries to console other hostages’ families while learning the worst about his own, are heartbreaking. His captors “are still human beings,” writes Sharabi, bravely modeling the forbearance that our leaders often lack.
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780063489790
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper Influence/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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