Good reading for chaotic times.
A New York Times Berlin correspondent explores the remarkable political tenure of former German chancellor Angela Merkel.
Before the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the U.S. was the global champion of liberal democracy. After that, many observers turned to Germany, headed by then-chancellor Merkel, as the new leader of the free world. Eddy examines Merkel’s life and political career not just in terms of what she achieved, but also in terms of what they can teach both leaders and citizens about how “to lead on any level, or simply to live with integrity.” At the heart of Merkel’s power was her ability to resist expectations to fit any molds. She never let the fact she was a female in a sexist, male-dominated government and society stand in her way. Instead, she focused intensely on the work of governing, brushing off superficial criticisms about her appearance and attire until they became nonissues. Turning weaknesses into strengths, she used every part of her unique background to her advantage. Eddy notes that Merkel’s training as a research scientist taught her to consider “all sides of an option,” even though doing so made her appear indecisive. She also remarks that Merkel’s outsider status as an East German taught her the art of building alliances, which later helped her save the European Union during the financial crisis of 2008. When the ex-chancellor allowed Syrian and African refugees into Germany between 2015 and 2016, she displayed not only a desire to move beyond Germany’s brutal Nazi past, but the moral courage to stand down opposition from critics. As Eddy honors the woman who helped rebuild and reshape a formerly divided country, she suggests that despite the messiness of the democratic process, it still offers the most humane way forward for all in an increasingly unstable world.
Good reading for chaotic times.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781982191030
Page Count: 192
Publisher: One Signal/Atria
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
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
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
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