A refreshingly bold and candid voice.
A progressive political commentator offers his insights into the dysfunction that characterizes the modern Republican Party.
In his debut book, Cohen argues that the “Party of Lincoln” has been hijacked by “a burgeoning extremist faction for whom compromise is unacceptable and chaos is the goal.” Furthermore, “this reality is getting exponentially worse year after year—and as citizens, we are becoming dangerously numb to it.” The authoritarianism Republicans now represent threatens American democracy, and the assaults on decency and common sense, as made by the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, pose grave dangers. Drawing on conversations with historians, constitutional scholars, former senators, attorneys, and Biden administration cabinet members, Cohen suggests that GOP dysfunction comes from a perverse desire to break—rather than reform—a government system they believe is too large to function well. Before Trump became the party’s “racist, misogynist, anti-everything narcissist” center of gravity and just after Obama’s 2008 election win, Republicans like Newt Gingrich were laying the groundwork for a strategy built on opposition for partisan gain. Others, like Mitch McConnell, would pursue that strategy relentlessly throughout both Obama’s and Biden’s tenures as president. At the same time, they transformed “human wrecking ball” Donald Trump into the GOP standard-bearer who gave them license to “openly court white supremacists and neo-Nazis, who now march proudly down our streets.” However dismal the current political landscape, Cohen still believes that the situation can be salvaged if Americans recognize the power of their own agency. Rather than take refuge in helplessness, the author suggests that citizens must not only continue to participate in democracy, but they must also actively persuade those who have lost faith—and who now constitute the margins on which modern "elections are won or lost"—to participate as well.
A refreshingly bold and candid voice.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780063392885
Page Count: 224
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.
Enduring the unthinkable.
This memoir—the first by an Israeli taken captive by Hamas on October 7, 2023—chronicles the 491 days the author was held in Gaza. Confined to tunnels beneath war-ravaged streets, Sharabi was beaten, humiliated, and underfed. When he was finally released in February, he learned that Hamas had murdered his wife and two daughters. In the face of scarcely imaginable loss, Sharabi has crafted a potent record of his will to survive. The author’s ordeal began when Hamas fighters dragged him from his home, in a kibbutz near Gaza. Alongside others, he was held for months at a time in filthy subterranean spaces. He catalogs sensory assaults with novelistic specificity. Iron shackles grip his ankles. Broken toilets produce an “unbearable stink,” and “tiny white worms” swarm his toothbrush. He gets one meal a day, his “belly caving inward.” Desperate for more food, he stages a fainting episode, using a shaving razor to “slice a deep gash into my eyebrow.” Captors share their sweets while celebrating an Iranian missile attack on Israel. He and other hostages sneak fleeting pleasures, finding and downing an orange soda before a guard can seize it. Several times, Sharabi—51 when he was kidnapped—gives bracing pep talks to younger compatriots. The captives learn to control what they can, trading family stories and “lift[ing] water bottles like dumbbells.” Remarkably, there’s some levity. He and fellow hostages nickname one Hamas guard “the Triangle” because he’s shaped like a SpongeBob SquarePants character. The book’s closing scenes, in which Sharabi tries to console other hostages’ families while learning the worst about his own, are heartbreaking. His captors “are still human beings,” writes Sharabi, bravely modeling the forbearance that our leaders often lack.
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780063489790
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper Influence/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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
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