An accessible and informative reassessment of an infamous terrorist incident that offers new details.
An expert on Libya and a witness to the 2012 Benghazi attack reassesses the tragedy and its impact.
Even after a decade, Chorin writes, the aforementioned attack on two American diplomatic outposts remains “confusing” and, in some instances, “genuinely puzzling.” Not only are multiple eyewitness accounts “distorted” and some critical information is simply “missing,” he says, but the account of the terrorist incident also became more muddied by its immediate politicization. Indeed, he asserts that the attack served as a shibboleth for Republicans who accused “Democrats of covering up critical information,” with Democrats retorting that “it was drama manufactured by Republicans.” As he notes, the event continues to resonate: “Benghazi wasn’t the cause of any of America’s political dysfunctions….But it was both a symptom and accelerator of them.” As one of the few American diplomats posted in Libya in the early 2000s—and as the author of Exit the Colonel (2012), a book on Libyan history and politics, Chorin is an authority on the North African nation; his writings have also appeared in the New York Times and Foreign Policy. This book does an admirable job of analyzing the impact of Benghazi on U.S. foreign policy and domestic politics, and it’s effective at providing historical context. The greatest strength of the book, however, lies in its heart-pounding narrative, which describes Chorin’s personal experiences in Benghazi from a nearby hotel on the night of the attack. Though no longer a diplomat, he was working at the time as a coordinator for a multinational company researching port cities; despite leaving the Foreign Service, he admits, “I couldn’t leave Libya behind.”
Over the course of this book, Chorin provides a harrowing personal perspective on the fateful day, with a number of salient details readers won’t find elsewhere. These include an account of speaking with U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, who invited the author to the doomed compound mere hours before his own death, and of being left behind after the first round of Benghazi evacuations. Moreover, the author draws on two decades of connections within the country, interviewing multiple non-American subjects, some of whose names have been changed in these pages in order to protect their anonymity; they’ve heretofore refused to give interviews about the events, Chorin says. The book is supported by more than 50 pages of sources and citations, and it balances remarkable depth with an engaging narrative. The complexity that surrounds Benghazi is presented in all its nuance, yet the author’s commanding prose helps to guide readers smoothly through the frenzied series of events. This effort is accompanied by an ample assortment of maps and timelines as well as a list of key figures. Admirably, the author does not engage in partisan statements, refusing to use the tragedy to score political points; Republicans, including Donald Trump, are criticized for exploiting the event to win votes, and the Obama administration is criticized for mishandling a tragedy that, according to the author, was “preventable.” An accessible and informative reassessment of an infamous terrorist incident that offers new details.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 9780306829727
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
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
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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