Long-term reporting informs a rich portrait of a community—and a country—in the shadow of an increasingly powerful president.
Authoritarianism’s street-level impact.
This is sturdy narrative journalism about life under Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s “gradualist authoritarian regime.” Fascinating on its own merits, it’s also an urgent cautionary tale for American readers. Hansen, the author of Notes on a Foreign Country (2017), lived in Turkey for a decade-plus. Her focus here is Istanbul’s working-class Karagümrük neighborhood, where she spent years getting to know people and their concerns. Her expansive conversations with shopkeepers, tradespeople, and local officials reveal a city on edge about immigration, corruption, and other familiar issues. Some Istanbullus complain that refugees from war-torn Syria don’t assimilate, resentment that fuels violence. Others express dismay that polarization emanating from Ankara, the capital, now sullies traditionally nonpartisan community leadership jobs. Diehard Erdoğan backers boast about their big families, evidence that they’ve heeded his call for “all Turkish women” to have five children. Hansen methodically chronicles the president’s consolidation of power, the effect of which is chillingly apparent after massive 2023 earthquakes. Paralyzed by an Erdoğan-instituted chain-of-command that slowed the military’s rescue response, countless lay dying under substandard buildings, the construction of which was fast tracked by defanged regulators. As citizens came to realize that the president “had engaged in unfathomable corruption, oppressed a large proportion of the citizenry, and squandered the people’s money,” voters showed signs of turning against him. But by then, Erdoğan had arrested or otherwise marginalized thousands of political opponents, reporters, and academics. A “canny, cruel autocratic leader” had prevailed by “manufacturing parallel realities.” Hansen’s deep-rooted reporting has undeniable gravitas. Turkey’s trajectory should be “very interesting” to Americans, a political scientist tells her. “We had a state. It wasn’t perfect, but we had something, and now it’s gone.”
Long-term reporting informs a rich portrait of a community—and a country—in the shadow of an increasingly powerful president.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9780374298432
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.
A wide-ranging critique of leftist politics as not being left enough.
Continuing his examination of progressive reform movements begun with The Cult of Smart, Marxist analyst deBoer takes on a left wing that, like all political movements, is subject to “the inertia of established systems.” The great moment for the left, he suggests, ought to have been the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the accumulated crimes of Donald Trump should have led to more than a minor upheaval. In Minneapolis, he writes, first came the call from the city council to abolish the police, then make reforms, then cut the budget; the grace note was “an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.” What happened? The author answers with the observation that it is largely those who can afford it who populate the ranks of the progressive movement, and they find other things to do after a while, even as those who stand to benefit most from progressive reform “lack the cultural capital and economic stability to have a presence in our national media and politics.” The resulting “elite capture” explains why the Democratic Party is so ineffectual in truly representing minority and working-class constituents. Dispirited, deBoer writes, “no great American revolution is coming in the early twenty-first century.” Accommodation to gradualism was once counted heresy among doctrinaire Marxists, but deBoer holds that it’s likely the only truly available path toward even small-scale gains. Meanwhile, he scourges nonprofits for diluting the tax base. It would be better, he argues, to tax those who can afford it rather than allowing deductible donations and “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.” Usefully, the author also argues that identity politics centering on difference will never build a left movement, which instead must find common cause against conservatism and fascism.
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016015
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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