Indelible portraits of people struggling to survive in a war-torn land.
A moving history through Afghan eyes.
Seierstad, an award-winning Norwegian journalist and the author of The Bookseller of Kabul, chronicles Afghanistan’s long history of fending off invaders but emphasizes the period after 1990 when, having expelled the USSR, it descended into a civil war that was finally won by the Taliban, a fundamentalist Islamic movement. Osama bin Laden moved to Afghanistan in 1996. The governing Taliban was not involved in 9/11, but the Bush administration made a fatal error by making no distinction between it and al-Qaeda. Taliban leadership refused the U.S. demand to hand over bin Laden but offered to compromise by expelling him to another Islamic nation. Proclaiming that America would never yield to the “bad guys,” President Bush ordered an invasion that quickly defeated Taliban forces, who did not stay defeated. This is not news to most readers, but Seierstad’s account of three Afghans who lived through these events delivers a fascinating if ultimately painful experience. Bashir, whose father died fighting the Russians in 1987, realized his childhood ambition to become a fighter after the American invasion. He spent 20 years in combat, then led other fighters in small-scale actions that occasionally killed a few Americans, yet they suffered plenty of deaths themselves. After victory, he discovers that he dislikes the tedious life of an administrator but never doubts that the good guys won. Polio rendered Jamila unmarriageable but lessened her father’s opposition to female schooling. She excelled and entered the American-supported government as an advocate of female education, but eventually she was forced to flee her native country, becoming a refugee. A member of a prosperous but conservative family, Ariana needed just one more semester to obtain a law degree when the Taliban expelled women from schools. For her protection, her family forced her to marry.
Indelible portraits of people struggling to survive in a war-torn land.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9781639736263
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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
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
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