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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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