Central to any discussion of modern totalitarianism.
The noted journalist and student of tyranny turns her attention to Trump, Putin, and numerous other modern authoritarians.
“A world in which autocracies work together to stay in power, work together to promote their system, and work together to damage democracies is not some distant dystopia,” writes Applebaum. “That world is the one we are living in right now.” In the meantime, she notes, democracies, as if paralyzed, accommodate both the lawlessness of the autocrats and the violence they incite: Witness, for instance, the growing myth that Jan. 6, 2021, was acceptable political expression. Whereas autocrats once worked singly, today they’re shored up by an international kleptocracy and shared understandings—don’t criticize my oppressiveness, and I won’t criticize yours—that make allies of disparate rulers from Washington to Budapest to Harare. These rulers are shameless, Applebaum notes. They no longer bother to disguise their acts of aggression and brutality, as with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a declaration that old rules no longer applied. Autocrats differ in style, but they share a hatred for an independent judiciary, representative government, and the free press—i.e., all the hallmarks of democracy. Against this, Applebaum suggests, it behooves the democratic nations of the world to band together in mutual support precisely because “their democracies are not safe.” One means of support would be to reject news that comes from the likes of Russia Today and Xinhua, which inform so much antidemocratic dissension in the “free world,” and instead insist on reliable information. Exactly how this is to be achieved isn’t quite clear, but it’s a worthy idea, as is the suggestion that increased policing of kleptocratic antics and their enablers—not least “the bankers in Sioux Falls happy to accept mystery deposits from mystery clients”—is needed.
Central to any discussion of modern totalitarianism.Pub Date: July 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780385549936
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
© 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.
