A shocking, heart-rending report from the front lines of the Covid-19 pandemic in China.
On-the-ground reporting of the coronavirus tragedy that continues to unfold in Wuhan and the Chinese government’s severe authoritarian response.
Rolling lockdowns are still ongoing in China, a harsh government imposition that Xuecun, nom de plume of Hao Qun, asserts has been a handy, efficient way for Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party to control its people. Since the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019, everyone has a QR code monitoring their health and legal status, allowing the government to physically remove citizens from their homes and jobs, herd them on buses, and lock them in isolation stations for long quarantine periods. The people are treated “like merchandise or livestock, destined for tightly guarded isolation centres—let’s call them concentration camps.” Xuecun came to Wuhan in April 2020, at the urging of his friend Clive Hamilton and despite the risk to himself, to chronicle stories by citizens, including that of Lin Qingchuan, one of countless doctors who contracted the virus while treating the patients in a community hospital with no medical or protection supplies. Lin offers a gruesome look inside the isolation stations and the power of neighborhood committees, and he reveals government attempts to cover up the severity of contagion and fudge the official numbers. In another heartbreaking case, Jin Feng, a retired hospital custodian, chronicles how no hospital would care for her and her husband, and he died in miserable conditions. Other stories include that of Li, one of Wuhan’s “black motorcycle” operators who “transport people illegally”; Liu Xiaoxiao, a substitute teacher who reveals how the normally compliant middle class was shocked by the Jan. 23, 2020, government shutdown of the city; and Yang Min, bereft after the denial of care to her dying daughter. “She is critically ill,” writes the author, “but the hospital can provide no treatment….Yang Min has no choice but to drag her febrile daughter to another hospital.”
A shocking, heart-rending report from the front lines of the Covid-19 pandemic in China.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781620977927
Page Count: 320
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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
SEEN & HEARD
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