A well-researched assessment of 21st-century media.
Freelance journalist Brasunas critiques modern media in this nonfiction work.
As an American citizen living in China during Britain’s 1997 transfer of Hong Kong, the author saw firsthand the power of the media in shaping public opinion. He observes that while American media emphasized concerns for the freedoms of the island’s people, the Chinese media’s response was predictably celebratory. It wasn’t until he worked as a journalist for the Huffington Post in the United States, however, that Brasunas developed his understanding of the ways systemic issues of internal censorship and bias influence American media. The author’s experiences covering presidential campaign events with activist Ralph Nader in 2000 and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2016 failed to align with the national media’s coverage, which either ignored the candidates altogether or dismissed their supporters with derisive monikers like “Bernie Bros.” The author offers readers a detailed history of media manipulation throughout U.S. history, from World War I propaganda to deliberate CIA misinformation campaigns. He goes on to present case studies of contemporary news stories in which, Brasunas asserts, corporate media and mainstream journalists were complicit in burying stories or were derelict in their ethical duty to investigate an issue beyond the official government narrative, from the 2003 invasion of Iraq to the 2019 sexual abuse case involving financier Jeffrey Epstein. A self-described progressive, the author targets what he sees as right-wing media misrepresentation, but he is also willing to highlight failures of left-leaning outlets, such as Facebook’s and Twitter’s coverage (or lack thereof) of Flint, Michigan’s water crisis. The book’s convincing critiques of the current state of American media are balanced by later chapters that are more optimistic in tone, offering readers pragmatic advice on how to consume a “Balanced Media Diet” and tips for informational literacy. Brasunas’ disdain for and distrust of media-anointed experts (including Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) and exhortations to “think for yourself” may echo some right-wing sentiments, but the book questions both conservative and liberal spins on most issues. Its impressive research is backed by almost 60 pages of endnotes that reference sources across the ideological spectrum.
A well-researched assessment of 21st-century media.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9781667874432
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Torchpost
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2023
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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