Sharp, memorable portraits of the myriad struggles of young people from Afghanistan.
A reporter’s intensive interviews with a diverse generation of Afghans over the last 20 years.
Rasmussen, a London-based journalist who covers Afghanistan, Iran, and European security affairs for the Wall Street Journal, offers poignant explorations of Afghan lives over two tumultuous decades. Since the fall of the first Taliban regime in 2001 after the U.S. invasion and occupation, there was a massive attempt at rebuilding the decimated country, bringing modernization efforts that began to include girls and women successfully into the education system. Many Afghans that had fled the first Taliban regime, such as Zahra’s and Saif’s families, migrating to Iran, returned by the early 2000s and attempted to rebuild their lives. Zahra was married off as a young teen and physically abused by her opium-addicted husband. Eventually, she was able to extricate herself from an oppressive tribal system and find education and employment. With her two children, she just managed to escape Kabul when the Americans evacuated in August 2021. Alex, a gay man who had spent his early years in Peshawar—where his family had moved to escape the Taliban—hoped to open the first gay bar in Kabul but had to abandon his dreams when the political situation grew more repressive by the 2010s. During that time, Omari became a Taliban soldier and witnessed an emergent Islamic State group before joining the triumphant Taliban entering the capital city in 2021. Parasto earned a university education and secured a good job with the Afghan government; after the fall of Kabul, she helped open schools for girls before she, too, was hounded into exile. Throughout, Rasmussen is a diligent, humane guide to the chaotic lives of ordinary citizens finding their way among the violence of extremism and war.
Sharp, memorable portraits of the myriad struggles of young people from Afghanistan.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9780374609948
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
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
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.
A wide-ranging critique of leftist politics as not being left enough.
Continuing his examination of progressive reform movements begun with The Cult of Smart, Marxist analyst deBoer takes on a left wing that, like all political movements, is subject to “the inertia of established systems.” The great moment for the left, he suggests, ought to have been the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the accumulated crimes of Donald Trump should have led to more than a minor upheaval. In Minneapolis, he writes, first came the call from the city council to abolish the police, then make reforms, then cut the budget; the grace note was “an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.” What happened? The author answers with the observation that it is largely those who can afford it who populate the ranks of the progressive movement, and they find other things to do after a while, even as those who stand to benefit most from progressive reform “lack the cultural capital and economic stability to have a presence in our national media and politics.” The resulting “elite capture” explains why the Democratic Party is so ineffectual in truly representing minority and working-class constituents. Dispirited, deBoer writes, “no great American revolution is coming in the early twenty-first century.” Accommodation to gradualism was once counted heresy among doctrinaire Marxists, but deBoer holds that it’s likely the only truly available path toward even small-scale gains. Meanwhile, he scourges nonprofits for diluting the tax base. It would be better, he argues, to tax those who can afford it rather than allowing deductible donations and “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.” Usefully, the author also argues that identity politics centering on difference will never build a left movement, which instead must find common cause against conservatism and fascism.
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016015
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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