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
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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BOOK REVIEW
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