A convincingly argued, well-researched critique of the American Left by a fellow progressive.
Neill challenges fellow liberals to rethink their approach to Trump supporters in this third nonfiction work in a series.
“I do believe Donald Trump spreads misogyny and hate,” the author writes in this book’s introduction, adding that he also believes the president to be “cruel, solipsistic, and amoral.” With that said, the author isn’t trying to persuade readers to share his view of President Trump, but rather to ask fellow progressives to examine how their own actions may have driven nominally apolitical or moderate voters towards Trump as a candidate. Central to the book’s argument is that Trump supporters have legitimate grievances against the establishment, and to reduce their support to raw “racism, sexism, and xenophobia” is an attempt to “gaslight them.” Drawing on the antiracist work of activist Ibram X. Kendi and others, Neill emphasizes that “shaming others is not a tool for social justice,” and instead calls on his colleagues on the Left to apply their core values of compassion and understanding to those with different political beliefs. Sweeping claims that Trump supporters are ignorant or morally deficient, he says, are counterproductive to a winning electoral strategy, which he argues should reach out to people who feel marginalized, rather than further alienate them. By abandoning disillusioned men, he asserts, the Left created a vacuum that was filled by promoters of toxic masculinity. This is the latest work in a multibook series on systemic racism, whose previous volumes tackled structural racism head-on from the perspective of “a well-meaning-but imperfect-ally.” Neill, a past recipient of the Martin Luther King Jr. Torch of Peace Award, has a solid theoretical foundation in critical race theory and antiracist literature, and he backs his argument with a network of scholarly citations. He’s also the author of more than a dozen SF and fantasy novels, and he balances his academic bona fides (which include a master’s degree in public health from Emory University) with an engaging, well-argued, and accessible writing style, accompanied by personal anecdotes, textbox vignettes, and Spooner’s pen-and-ink illustrations.
A convincingly argued, well-researched critique of the American Left by a fellow progressive.Pub Date: March 14, 2025
ISBN: 9798313818528
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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