Terrific on-the-ground reportage during the initial fraught months of the ongoing war.
A Ukrainian-born foreign affairs correspondent maps the war in progress.
As someone who grew up in Kyiv and speaks both Ukrainian and Russian, Wall Street Journal reporter Trofimov, author of The Siege of Mecca, offers a fly-on-the-wall glimpse into the continuing conflict, via both official reports and firsthand accounts from the streets. In Feb. 23, 2022, when “Kyiv was still a city at peace,” the author’s meeting with former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko tipped him off to what was about to happen, as officials began to flee. “Russian triumph within days was a foregone conclusion, Western intelligence services predicted,” Trofimov reports; no one seriously believed Ukraine could hold off Russian forces. “For centuries, Russian military power had terrified Europe,” writes the author. “As for this place called Ukraine, was it, deep down, a real country after all?” Along with Spanish photojournalist Manu Brabo (the book contains a photo insert), the author moved toward the action, first from Kyiv in the first hours of the Russian onslaught, as the Ukraine Territorial Defense, National Guard, and Air Force helped withstand the capture of the crucial Hostomel Airport; to Kharkiv and Mariupol, strategic cities in the north and south, respectively; Voznesensk and Mykolaiv; and eventually to the Donbas, where Putin withdrew his forces reluctantly to dig in and retrench by April. Along the tumultuous journey of many uncertain months, the author interviewed scores of fighters, civilians, and officials, and he capably reveals how Ukraine managed to channel its steely motivation and national unity into real action on the battlefield. Trofimov also ably conveys that despite some wobbly local officials whose loyalties have been tested, there’s been no question where Ukraine has stood since 2014, when Russia invaded Crimea and essentially “forfeited the sympathy of most Ukrainians, likely for generations.”
Terrific on-the-ground reportage during the initial fraught months of the ongoing war.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780593655184
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
