A heartbreaking yet authoritative, necessary look at a ruined nation.
Tracking the tragic demise of the once-thriving, oil-rich nation.
As the Caracas-based Andes bureau chief for the New York Times from 2012 to 2016, Neuman is well qualified to recount the South American nation’s precipitous decline. He records Venezuela’s dramatic political and economic changes through interviews and deft firsthand observations, exploring the collapse of social institutions, entrenched poverty, staggering inflation, chronic blackouts, famine, and pervasive despair. Neuman points to two specific elements that help explain the tumult: the “Resource Curse” caused by its massive oil wealth, to which the entire economy was chained; and the violent rift between those who supported Hugo Chávez, the publicity-hungry president who nationalized the oil industry and centralized the government, and those who did not. Chávez “mined [the rift] and encouraged it until it became part of the landscape, something that people took as a given.” When he died in 2013, after 14 years as president, he was succeeded by his crony Nicolás Maduro, “a less talented politician who styled himself as the ideological heir of the man he called the eternal comandante.” In 2014, the massive drop in oil prices collapsed the economy, as the country depended almost entirely on its oil exports, at the expense of all others. In 2018, the disputed reelection of Maduro, tainted by heavy-handed oppression of his opponents, led to the attempted coup by the head of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, who declared himself interim president in 2019. Despite support by the U.S. and others in a concerted effort to depose Maduro—accompanied by crippling sanctions by the Trump administration—there was no citizens uprising, as hoped, just more misery. The author delivers the best kind of journalism, combining powerful facts and pointed observation, as he moves from one alarming event to the next, bringing into the spotlight countless Venezuelans who have little hope for the future.
A heartbreaking yet authoritative, necessary look at a ruined nation.Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-26616-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
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
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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