A vivid journalistic report.
An Egyptian journalist offers a brief, pungent dispatch from the vibrant youth music scene pushing against authoritarian dictates in her country.
A participant in the protest movement that convulsed Cairo during the Arab Spring of 2011, El Rashidi, the author of The Battle for Egypt and Chronicle of a Last Summer, has been a keen observer of the alarming crackdown on civil liberties in Egypt since Gen. Abdel Fattah El-Sisi took power two years later. The author follows several popular young hip-hop artists who continue to push against governmental boundaries and express ongoing revolutionary dissent. In a country where 60% of the population (65 million) is under the age of 29, the Arabic genre of hip-hop known as “mahraganat,” borrowing from American artists like Snoop Dogg, Tupac, Eminem, and Jay-Z, has been thriving. Marwan Pablo, one mahraganat artist who emerged from the street scene in the strictly conservative Islamic city of Alexandria, peppers his work with swear words and references to alcohol and had to go underground for a spell. As the author notes, he raps deeply emotional lyrics about “rising above the circumstances that plagued young men like himself, to buy himself freedom.” Expressing a general angst of disenfranchised young men, Cairo rapper 3enba became so popular that the government issued him a “syndicate” to perform, thus holding him on a tight leash. El Rashidi traces the beginnings of this musical trend in cybercafes, and she clearly shows the gravity of official condemnation and suppression of the work as blasphemy. The author’s interest in writing about this subject matter stems from her disappointment in her millennial generation, which, in the face of oppression, wilted. “These singers,” she writes, “have commanded my attention, even envy at first, precisely for their lack of inhibition—for their fierce assertion of independent, nonconformist identities….They did not cave in, as my generational peers did. They do not swallow their words.”
A vivid journalistic report.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9798987053508
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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