A fierce denunciation of a pointless war “punctuated by little deaths and big deaths and then just death.”
A former Marine officer recounts his disillusionment with the American military-industrial complex.
When he arrived for officer training before being sent to Afghanistan, Rubin was given a long list of bullet points assembled by officers who had been in the field, with recommendations such as buying a new canteen in the place of the nasty government-issued one and carrying tweezers to rid oneself of ticks. “The best bit, though,” he writes, “was the simple warning that it was all going to be very fucked, it was designed that way, and the most you could do was mitigate the worst of it through nonstop anticipation.” That was exactly so, he found. Having been through enlisted basic training and experienced its grinding dehumanization by which young men and women “became clumsy beasts, scared beasts, and self-conscious beasts, unsure of how beastly to be and when,” the former college Republican found himself wondering about the uselessness of a war in which everything was transactional. For ordinary Afghans in the countryside, it was normal to greet GIs one day and Taliban fighters the next, hoping neither would destroy their homes; for Marines, it was enough to stay alive when “everyone was getting fucked by the green weenie in the suck.” Rubin gets a little textbook-ish when, returning stateside to wrestle with depression and PTSD, he mounts a critique of “the carceral state and the warfare state and the capitalist state,” but there’s a sharp point to his anger over lives and treasure wasted in the name of profit for a few as well as regret for having serviced a machine centered on murder. Though lacking the street-smart fury of Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July or the literary merits of Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead, Rubin’s book is a rueful, heartfelt admonition.
A fierce denunciation of a pointless war “punctuated by little deaths and big deaths and then just death.”Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64503-709-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bold Type Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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