An uplifting account of genuine heroics in the latest American military debacle.
A suspenseful chronicle of a dramatic rescue at the end of America’s evacuation of Afghanistan in 2021.
In his latest, Zuckoff, the bestselling author of 13 Hours and Fall and Rise, finds his hero in Sam Aronson, who gave up his job as a bodyguard for the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service to become a Foreign Service officer; his first post was in Nigeria. Later, while volunteering to help in Afghanistan, he found himself at Kabul International Airport with only a few weeks before its scheduled shutdown. The author delivers a vivid description of the enormous crowds besieging its fortified gates in blazing heat with no food, water, or toilets. Fewer than 40 officials, Aronson included, screened potential evacuees to ensure that their papers were in order or that they were in obvious danger and needed to get out. Screeners were overwhelmed, and as the deadline approached, superiors increasingly restricted those eligible to evacuate. “Family separations again proved the most wrenching part of the work,” writes Zuckoff. “Weeping women clung to Sam. Men cried in his arms. Sam had to pry some away, into the custody of Marines.” The book’s other major figure is Homeira Qaderi, a 38-year-old Afghan activist, author, and TV commentator, whose memoir, Dancing in the Mosque (2020) was a bestseller. At the time, no one doubted that the victorious Taliban would kill her, but for reasons that remain unclear, she refused pleas to flee until the last day. Aronson and Qaderi do not meet until near the end of the book. Mostly, Zuckoff delivers a gripping account of Aronson’s routine during those final days. Increasingly distressed at the tragedies he witnessed, he began to flout screening guidelines, a process that could have derailed his career but apparently hasn’t. Only hours before the shutdown, he received frantic pleas from Qaderi’s American agent. A last-minute rescue seemed impossible, but he made it happen.
An uplifting account of genuine heroics in the latest American military debacle.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9780593594841
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
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
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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