An excellent, fearless work of political reportage in the face of America’s violent discontents.
A view of the MAGA-wrought culture wars as they play out in small towns.
Abramsky, author of The American Way of Poverty and The House of Twenty Thousand Books, chronicles his visits to red islands in mostly blue states, such as Sequim, Washington, which was torn apart by antinomian politics during the pandemic. The county’s medical officer tried to head off the virus by requiring masks and restricting bars and restaurants to vaccinated patrons. It worked, and in the capital, officials “extended the proof-of-vaccination mandate to include the entire state of Washington.” Her strategy earned death threats, propelled by people who make significant money spreading lies. Abramsky ranges to places such as deep-red Shasta County, California, where locals seriously discuss secession when things like virus-control mandates arrive from the faraway capital and where political action is often a reaction to progressivism, such that “a half-century-plus of social change was being litigated and litigated again on a daily basis.” It’s in small-town America where the culture wars are being fought the most fiercely: where experts come under attack, where books are banned, where school boards are taken over by people intent on dismantling public education. More than that, as Abramsky illustrates at numerous points, in those small towns, where progressives are most often a distinct minority, those wars are being fought between right-wingers and farther-right-wingers, complete with litmus tests of ideological purity. Fortunately, it seems that more moderate forces are in the ascendant. After the pandemic, writes the author, many voters returned to the center: “The majority…wanted their local public officials to be laser-focused on issues such as housing rather than going down rabbit holes about QAnon, about the evils of public health responses to a once-in-a-century pandemic, about stolen elections.”
An excellent, fearless work of political reportage in the face of America’s violent discontents.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781645030430
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bold Type Books
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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
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
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