A searing, absolutely necessary exposé of the uses of rape in recent wars and of global injustices to the survivors.
The chief foreign affairs correspondent for the London Sunday Times shows the horrific effects of the mass rape of women and girls in conflict zones around the world.
Lamb’s editors have put “Disturbing Content” warnings atop some of the stories she’s filed about hot spots from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. “Disturbing” is too mild a word for this superb exposé of the use of mass rape as a “systematic weapon of war.” Crisscrossing the globe to interview survivors, the author makes it abundantly clear that the devastating effects of rape transcend borders. She chronicles her discussions with Nigerian women kidnapped as schoolgirls by Boko Haram and forced to serve as the terrorists’ “bush wives.” She met Yazidis abducted by the Islamic State group and used as sex slaves or sold through online forums that “advertised women along with PlayStation consoles and second-hand cars.” She spoke to female survivors of the Rohingya genocide and of a “rape camp” where Bosnian Serbs raped Muslim women “all night every night to the point of madness.” Legal justice mostly eludes these and other victims. The International Criminal Court has made only one conviction for rape as a war crime, overturned on appeal, and such cases have had a similar fate elsewhere, often because male judges or prosecutors “do not see sexual violence as a high priority compared to mass killings.” Some victims have been ignored until championed by celebrities like Angelina Jolie or Denis Mukwege, the Congolese physician and co-winner of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize whose hospital the author visited despite the risks of Ebola and dangerous militias in the area. To tell some of these stories, Lamb clearly has put herself in peril, and it’s difficult to overpraise her courage or a book that—for the breadth and moral force of its arguments—is perhaps the most important work of nonfiction about rape since Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will (1975).
A searing, absolutely necessary exposé of the uses of rape in recent wars and of global injustices to the survivors.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9917-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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