Controversial, as Lévy is wont to be, but nuanced, and an argument worth hearing out.
The eminent French philosopher and journalist champions Israel at a time when that nation is increasingly isolated.
Only one option remains to Israel in its war against Hamas and Hezbollah, and by extension Iran, writes Lévy: “That option is to win.” Known to his French compatriots as BHL, Lévy holds that winning must almost certainly come in the form of military action, putting victory squarely in the hands of the Israeli Defense Forces “while taking every possible precaution to minimize civilian casualties.” While Lévy argues that the IDF has taken those precautions, the devastation of Gaza notwithstanding, he does acknowledge exceptions, as with the killing of workers for the World Central Kitchen—a “mistake,” he asserts, that should be adjudicated. As for the precipitating Event—Lévy capitalizes it in the sense of a black swan event that can be guessed at but never accurately forecast—he is unwavering: The death of children is unforgivable, he urges, and on Oct. 7, 2023, “Hamas made no distinction between adults and children,” deliberately attacking civilians and kidnapping and killing minors. Lévy adds, with evident contempt for the defenders of Hamas on the world’s campuses and social media platforms, “I need no lessons on this subject from those who did not weep with me over the children gassed by Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, the children drowned off the coast of Lampedusa in their open migrant boats, the children bled white in Yemen, Nigeria, or Mogadishu.” That may not be a winning formula for changing minds, but the larger point of Lévy’s essay is that Israel stands alone because of both antisemitism and the tyranny of public opinion, with too many people forgetting that Palestine’s leaders “thought only of annihilating” those on the other side of the wall.
Controversial, as Lévy is wont to be, but nuanced, and an argument worth hearing out.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9798888457832
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Wicked Son
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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