A searing attack on historical injustices.
Beyond catastrophes.
Accounts of epidemics are a respectable publishing genre, but journalist and science historian Bonhomme uses them as a springboard for exploring inequality. Cholera, a major 19th-century killer, seems to be the subject of the first chapter, yet in a preview of what follows, Bonhomme opens in 1857 New Orleans, where a white physician lectured a meeting of the New Orleans Academy of Science on the supposed inferiority of the Black race. The audience listened respectfully. Although Bonhomme summarizes the nature of cholera, the purported causes (all wrong), and its treatment (always useless, often harmful) according to antebellum medical science, she describes the unspeakable conditions under which enslaved people lived. Readers will realize that this is not a history of epidemics but a fierce polemic arguing that minorities and the poor suffer when diseases rage because governments and the medical profession give them short shrift. The second chapter focuses on Africa during the colonial period. Sleeping sickness was rampant, and European physicians, eager to apply the latest science to conquer it, forced indigenous victims to undergo experiments without their permission, prescribing toxic drugs forbidden in Europe, and failed. The author’s discussion of Ebola emphasizes the ravages of colonialism, which left African nations with inadequate medical care systems. Readers may be surprised to learn that Ebola, mostly fatal in Africa, is curable when treated in a modern hospital. The 1918 influenza pandemic, meanwhile, plays a modest role in a compelling account of how authors, notably Virginia Woolf, dealt with illness by writing. “In her letters to family and friends,” writes Bonhomme, “she reflected on her pain, noting, ‘My hand shakes no longer, but my mind vibrates uncomfortably, as it always does after an incursion of visitors; unexpected, and slightly unsympathetic.’ Even when she suffered, Woolf’s beautiful prose pulls one to her world.”
A searing attack on historical injustices.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781982197834
Page Count: 320
Publisher: One Signal/Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
