A well-curated but disjointed collection of post-disaster Lebanese female voices.
A Lebanese journalist interviews the nation’s women about the impact of a deadly, unexplained explosion in Beirut.
On Aug. 4, 2020, a warehouse storing ammonium nitrate caught fire and exploded in Beirut’s port, killing at least 220 people and injuring 6,000, including many foreign nationals. The disaster not only occurred in the middle of the pandemic, but also during an unprecedented economic crisis that spurred nationwide protests against Lebanon’s wealthy ruling class. Mawad, a Paris-based journalist, mother, and relative of an assassinated Lebanese president, began reporting stories that often focused on the “psychological toll of the blast.” Most of the author’s interviewees were women. “I began putting together survivors’ stories, particularly from women, although that was never a deliberate choice at the outset,” she writes. “Many of these women lost everything that day: the most precious people in their lives, their physical and mental health, their homes and livelihoods, their ability to be happy and to feel in any way secure.” Mawad intersperses a collection of these interviews with historical context and her emotional reactions to hearing the women’s words. The author includes conversations with a variety of people, including nurses, doctors, Syrian refugees, and at least one former celebrity. Toward the end, Mawad describes her decision to move with her daughter to Paris, stating that she was escaping “an abusive relationship with my country,” which she classifies as a “failed state.” At its best, the book is deeply researched and profoundly moving. At times, the author’s descriptions of her personal reactions divert attention from the women’s powerful stories. Likewise, her rage about her country’s failures feels more suited to memoir than reporting. The result is a book that, despite many moments of literary merit, suffers from a lack of cohesion.
A well-curated but disjointed collection of post-disaster Lebanese female voices.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781399406253
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury Continuum
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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