A provocative, pointed challenge to all Americans to dig harder for the truth.
A sharp dissection of a culture of lies, secrets, and conspiracies—including “the original conspiracy theory: American exceptionalism.”
Even paranoiacs have enemies. In the case of current citizens of the U.S., the enemies are countless, as demonstrated by Kendzior, author of Hiding in Plain Sight and The View From Flyover Country. By the author’s account, the GOP is one, and particularly Republicans in state legislatures who insist that their states are naturally “red” when, in fact, almost everywhere is purple—“like a bruise.” Alas, Kendzior notes, Americans are gullible people: A week after the 2020 election, only 3% of the population believed that Donald Trump had won, but a year after, “only 58 percent of Americans—and only 21 percent of Republicans—still believed that Biden was the legitimate president.” In such an environment, it’s small wonder that conspiracy theories are in wide circulation. Some of them are bizarre enough to seem almost parodies—e.g., “Pizzagate.” Others, by Kendzior’s account, have stronger legs. For example, we still don’t know all the facts about 9/11, particularly when it comes to Saudi Arabia’s involvement, and the leaders of the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol have yet to be brought to justice. In a corrupt culture of lies (think of the thousands Trump sputtered), chain reactions fire wildly. Since we mistrust authority but yield to power, it’s the loudest voice in the room that wins, no matter how ridiculous the matter in question might be. Take QAnon’s assertion that only Trump could save us from a pedophile ring, when in fact allegations of pedophilia have long surrounded him. Kendzior’s indignation can sometimes wax a touch too righteous, as when she snipes at Anthony Fauci for his supposedly overweening self-regard. Nonetheless, her incisive account of a society in a death spiral, beset by “simultaneous revivals of the worst of the American past,” is endlessly compelling.
A provocative, pointed challenge to all Americans to dig harder for the truth.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-21072-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
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
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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