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BEIRUT 2020

Name: BEIRUT 2020
Author: Charif Majdalani
ISBN: 978-1-63542-178-1

DIARY OF THE COLLAPSE

by Charif Majdalani ; translated by Ruth Diver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 3, 2021

A sleek, well-rendered work to wake readers up to the plight of the Lebanese people.

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A French Lebanese professor and author assesses a catastrophic summer in his hometown.

As the economic meltdown intensified in a city already suffering from political and social strife, the situation was further compounded by the pandemic and the shattering explosion that occurred at the Beirut port on Aug. 4, 2020. In a stylistically arresting, truncated first-person narrative, Majdalani lays bare the saga of modern-day Beirut since it gained independence from the French mandate in 1945. The city’s “singular identity…also proved to be Lebanon’s defining characteristic for many years: a nation straddling the great cultures of the East and the West, a crossroads, a herald of coexistence, openness, cultural exchange and integration.” However, as the author shows, a series of corrupt leaders over the decades created “a system of governance that was entirely based on clientelistic mafia practices,” which drained the public coffers. The effect of this bankrupt economy is ever present in this urgent diary, which begins just before July 1, 2020. Majdalani writes about how he was considering buying land in the mountains to get his family out of the crowded, pandemic-stricken city. At the time, banks begin refusing withdrawals, the appliances in his Beirut apartment broke down, and the effects of rampant inflation grew alarming. Though the author and his wife still met friends at the few restaurants still hanging on, the number of businesses closing was staggering, as were constant problems involving garbage accumulation and a lack of social services. Then came the explosion, when 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate abandoned at the city’s port hangar resulted in more than 200 deaths, 7,500 injuries, and billions in damages. “The slow, meticulous sedimentation of time,” writes Majdalani, “was swept away in a few seconds by the blast of a vengeful and incomprehensibly cruel present.” The abrupt ending will leave readers wanting more, but the author gives us an important glimpse of a city that is often ignored in contemporary media.

A sleek, well-rendered work to wake readers up to the plight of the Lebanese people.

Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-63542-178-1

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Other Press

Review Posted Online: June 9, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A HISTORY OF THE BIG HOUSE
by Charif Majdalani ; translated by Ruth Diver

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ABUNDANCE

by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2025

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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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

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BUSINESS | U.S. GOVERNMENT

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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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.