Buy this book to honor Zelensky’s resistance to tyranny.
Ukraine’s president gathers 16 recent speeches, defiant and stirring, to rally the world to his embattled nation’s cause.
“We have chosen a path that leads to Europe, but Europe is not somewhere ‘out there.’ Europe is here, in the mind. And after it appears there, it will appear everywhere in Ukraine.” So said Zelensky in his inaugural address to the Ukrainian Parliament on May 20, 2019. It’s a moment worthy of Kennedy, Roosevelt, and Churchill. The author, a TV star before he entered politics, has extraordinary rhetorical range: One minute he appeals to the intelligentsia, the next to the ordinary people of his country, the next to the citizens of many nations. Since the invasion by Vladimir Putin’s forces, Zelensky has also taken to addressing the Russian people directly, in Russian, asking them of their war, “Who will suffer the most from this? The people. / Who does not want it more than anyone? The people. / Who can prevent it? The people.” His words become less measured following the discovery of the massacre at Bucha: “Russian mothers: even if you raised looters, how did they also become butchers?” Of Putin himself, Zelensky is largely dismissive, saying in one instance simply, “He has forgotten the most important point. Evil always loses.” Several themes remain constant. One is Zelensky’s contrasting Russia under the yoke of its dictator with Ukraine, a free nation in which, in this war, everyone is a volunteer and Zelensky is the volunteer-in-chief, as Economist Russia and Europe editor Arkady Ostrovsky puts it in the foreword. Another is that while Russia may belong to Asia, Ukraine is indeed a part of Europe. Still another is that Ukraine will never submit. Borrowing a page from Hamlet’s soliloquy, Zelensky told a British audience: “Our answer is definitely, ‘To be,’ and to be free.” All proceeds for the book go to United24, the author’s “initiative to collect donations in support of Ukraine.”
Buy this book to honor Zelensky’s resistance to tyranny.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2022
ISBN: 9780593727171
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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