A book of predictable hectoring—a far cry from the author’s best work.
A plangent diatribe against war.
In his latest, Hedges argues that “preemptive war is a war crime,” including in the Ukraine, but the West made Russia do it by extending NATO into Eastern Europe, so that “Russia has every right to feel threatened, betrayed, and angry.” And because Russian was the primary language of most Crimeans, why should Russia not have annexed the peninsula? The author’s condition-tinged discussion—which simultaneously damns and excuses the war in Ukraine—soon grows tiresome, especially because Hedges does not extend the same “yes, but” privilege to, say, Germany in its invasion of German-speaking Sudetenland or the U.S. in its invasion of Iraq. While excoriating the Biden administration for being stocked with presumed nationalists such as Anthony Blinken and Kimberly Kagan (the latter’s crime being, apparently, that she founded a think tank that studies war), Hedges writes, “When an enemy can’t be found, an enemy is manufactured. Putin has become…the new Hitler, out to grab Ukraine and the rest of Central and Eastern Europe.” Is Putin an invented foe? That seems a dividing-line question: If you answer in the affirmative, you’ll likely keep reading, and if not, not. A noted leftist critic, Hedges was a contributor to the now-shuttered Russian TV channel RT America, which may explain the rationalizations, against which his concluding prayer that we see “an end to war before we stumble into a nuclear holocaust that devours us all” seems halfhearted—particularly when it’s preceded by a call for a moratorium on arms shipments to Ukraine. Elsewhere, Hedges rehearses the usual charges, few surprising: War is bad because civilians get hurt, soldiers are scarred (“The worst trauma is often caused not by what combat veterans witnessed but by what they did”), corporations become rich, and so on.
A book of predictable hectoring—a far cry from the author’s best work.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64421-293-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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
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