A fun, colorful memoir of a global phenomenon.
A front-seat look at K-pop fandom.
The surfboard on top of the Korean wave that has swept the world in the past two decades has been K-pop, a mix of sugary tunes, precise choreography, handsome boys, and impossibly pretty girls. Kwon, an American-born Korean who was listening to it before it went global, provides an account of her relationship with K-pop, delving into its cultural roots and artistic development. For Kwon, as a teenager, the music was a way to escape the oppressive discipline of her family and to bond with her friends. But the intensity of K-pop fandom could be almost frightening. One Korean boy-band idol’s fans broke into his house to steal his underwear. Kwon never went that far, but she admits that dedication could easily turn into obsession. Behind the scenes, it was a grueling life for the entertainers, with management companies ruthlessly controlling every aspect of their lives, including savage diets and cosmetic surgery. Exploitation, especially of young women desperate for a shot at stardom, was rife. Kwon, who often felt caught between cultures, went through a series of battles with depression and believes that K-pop helped her cope. By the time BTS—the boy band known in Korea as Bantang (which translates to “bulletproof”)—became a worldwide craze, Kwon was no longer obsessive, although she found she could enjoy the music for its own sake. She sometimes loses the narrative thread in the second half of the book, but there’s still a lot—including Kwon’s willingness to laugh at herself—that makes it an enjoyable read.
A fun, colorful memoir of a global phenomenon.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781250886231
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Henry Holt
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
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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