Often repetitive, but with a point: the culture war is a real war, and the fundamentalists have their eyes on the prize.
A full-bore attack on Christian nationalism’s crusade to remake America.
A reader of her book, warns peripatetic journalist Lavin, is “an enemy combatant in a war of the spirit that began before your birth and is being waged every day by determined, ordinary people you wouldn’t look twice at if they passed you in the street.” Those people, Lavin asserts, are a small minority; evangelicals represent just 14% of the populace. Still, that’s nearly 50 million people, and they have an unshakable goal for which they’re willing to play a long game: namely, to establish “a Kingdom of Christ on Earth ruled by his elect.” That kingdom would make possible scenarios worthy of The Handmaid’s Tale: women, in the Christian fundamentalist order, are definitively second-class beings, meant to bear children and do the dishes. Children are meant to be obedient, and if they’re not, they’re subject to severe corporal punishment. On that point Lavin lingers too long, repeating assertions that “obedience to God requires doing violence to children” and its variants for page after page. Nonetheless, her analysis of where home schooling figures into the equation is disturbing: some children reject the indoctrination, but most, she holds, “live to be the future of the faith militant.” The unremittingly alarmist tone makes Lavin’s book a chore to read at times. Still, her overall points are well worth noting, particularly when it comes to looking at the long game: the evangelicals, allied now with supremacists and nationalists, have been concentrating quite effectively on transforming key aspects of American governance, especially the judiciary, into which the Trump administration has rushed to appoint lifetime judges committed to preserving “religious liberty,” which according to Lavin means “anything they did or said came under the stamp of morality, because it was they who were saying it.”
Often repetitive, but with a point: the culture war is a real war, and the fundamentalists have their eyes on the prize.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9780306829192
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Legacy Lit/Hachette
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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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