A vivid journalistic report.
An Egyptian journalist offers a brief, pungent dispatch from the vibrant youth music scene pushing against authoritarian dictates in her country.
A participant in the protest movement that convulsed Cairo during the Arab Spring of 2011, El Rashidi, the author of The Battle for Egypt and Chronicle of a Last Summer, has been a keen observer of the alarming crackdown on civil liberties in Egypt since Gen. Abdel Fattah El-Sisi took power two years later. The author follows several popular young hip-hop artists who continue to push against governmental boundaries and express ongoing revolutionary dissent. In a country where 60% of the population (65 million) is under the age of 29, the Arabic genre of hip-hop known as “mahraganat,” borrowing from American artists like Snoop Dogg, Tupac, Eminem, and Jay-Z, has been thriving. Marwan Pablo, one mahraganat artist who emerged from the street scene in the strictly conservative Islamic city of Alexandria, peppers his work with swear words and references to alcohol and had to go underground for a spell. As the author notes, he raps deeply emotional lyrics about “rising above the circumstances that plagued young men like himself, to buy himself freedom.” Expressing a general angst of disenfranchised young men, Cairo rapper 3enba became so popular that the government issued him a “syndicate” to perform, thus holding him on a tight leash. El Rashidi traces the beginnings of this musical trend in cybercafes, and she clearly shows the gravity of official condemnation and suppression of the work as blasphemy. The author’s interest in writing about this subject matter stems from her disappointment in her millennial generation, which, in the face of oppression, wilted. “These singers,” she writes, “have commanded my attention, even envy at first, precisely for their lack of inhibition—for their fierce assertion of independent, nonconformist identities….They did not cave in, as my generational peers did. They do not swallow their words.”
A vivid journalistic report.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9798987053508
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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