Karatnycky combines eyewitness accounts with historical analysis, adding depth and insight to the bulletins of war.
An authoritative account of how the Russian invasion, meant to bury Ukrainian culture, has had exactly the opposite effect.
Ukraine’s battle against Russia has become a defining event of our time, testing the limits of Western will and demonstrating how an emerging democracy can fight against a larger, belligerent power. Karatnycky, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and the CEO of the nonprofit Freedom House, is not an impartial commentator, and he clearly lays out his deep, longstanding personal and professional ties to the country. The author examines the development of cultural trends since 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine declared independence. He frames the story by examining the presidential administrations since that time, which have veered between democratic populists like Viktor Yushchenko and corrupt oligarchs such as Leonid Kuchma. Power ebbed and flowed in various ways, from public demonstrations to government thuggery, which meant that no stable model of government emerged. Behind the scenes, writes Karatnycky, a sense of national identity was recovering, drawing on Ukraine’s rich history and cultural distinctiveness. The author devotes two chapters to Volodymyr Zelensky, first examining his early stumbles and overdependence on social media. Amazingly, after the invasion, Zelensky rose to the challenge, becoming a resolute national figure and displaying hands-on courage. Between Zelensky’s leadership and the requirements of war, the Ukrainian identity solidified, becoming the most potent weapon of the conflict. Karatnycky believes that Ukraine will eventually prevail, but it needs continued support, including advanced weaponry and the transfer of $300 billion in Russian assets held in Western banks as reparations. He might be overly optimistic about this idea, but his book is an important addition to the literature, featuring an innovative approach that provides a useful background.
Karatnycky combines eyewitness accounts with historical analysis, adding depth and insight to the bulletins of war.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9780300269468
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
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
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.
A wide-ranging critique of leftist politics as not being left enough.
Continuing his examination of progressive reform movements begun with The Cult of Smart, Marxist analyst deBoer takes on a left wing that, like all political movements, is subject to “the inertia of established systems.” The great moment for the left, he suggests, ought to have been the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the accumulated crimes of Donald Trump should have led to more than a minor upheaval. In Minneapolis, he writes, first came the call from the city council to abolish the police, then make reforms, then cut the budget; the grace note was “an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.” What happened? The author answers with the observation that it is largely those who can afford it who populate the ranks of the progressive movement, and they find other things to do after a while, even as those who stand to benefit most from progressive reform “lack the cultural capital and economic stability to have a presence in our national media and politics.” The resulting “elite capture” explains why the Democratic Party is so ineffectual in truly representing minority and working-class constituents. Dispirited, deBoer writes, “no great American revolution is coming in the early twenty-first century.” Accommodation to gradualism was once counted heresy among doctrinaire Marxists, but deBoer holds that it’s likely the only truly available path toward even small-scale gains. Meanwhile, he scourges nonprofits for diluting the tax base. It would be better, he argues, to tax those who can afford it rather than allowing deductible donations and “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.” Usefully, the author also argues that identity politics centering on difference will never build a left movement, which instead must find common cause against conservatism and fascism.
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016015
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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