A disturbing, insightful book about China’s hidden, multitiered war—and how the West can fight back.
A penetrating study of Beijing’s strategy to become the dominant global power.
There was a time when Western leaders thought that engagement with China would eventually lead to that country becoming more liberal, open, and even democratic. Looking back, that view seems hopelessly naïve. Allen, the China reporter for Axios, has been observing and writing about the country for a long time, and her book is a deep dive into how China is constantly maneuvering to expand its global influence, with an ever growing list of “core interests.” The central weapon is the government’s control of access to China’s enormous market, which it can lock down through punitive tariffs, bureaucratic delays, or outright bans. Nearly every country in the world has felt China’s heavy hand. Any Western company wanting to do business in China has to accept Beijing’s censorship and avoid controversial statements. At the same time, Chinese companies are effectively under government control, propagating the official line. In an incisive analysis, Allen examines China’s covert penetration of the American political system and international agencies such as the World Health Organization. She believes that Beijing has overplayed its hand and is widely seen as an arrogant bully, which gives the West the opportunity to respond at many levels. She makes a series of useful proposals, but a crucial requirement is a change in attitude in the U.S. The left and the right have a surprising amount in common on this issue and should work together instead of making narrow-minded attacks on each other. Allen has shown remarkable courage in writing this book, as the tentacles of the Beijing government are long, powerful, and patient. Hopefully, her work will find its way to policymakers in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.
A disturbing, insightful book about China’s hidden, multitiered war—and how the West can fight back.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9780063057418
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
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
SEEN & HEARD
This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.
A story of ordinary people, both victims and survivors, thrown into extraordinary history.
Pellegrino says his book is “simply the story of what happened to people and objects under the atomic bombs, and it is dedicated to the hope that no one will ever witness this, or die this way, again.” Images of Aug. 6, 1945, as reported by survivors, include the sight of a cart falling from the sky with the hindquarters of the horse pulling it still attached; a young boy who put his hands over his eyes as the bomb hit—and “saw the bones of his fingers shining through shut eyelids, just like an X-ray photograph”; “statue people” flash-fossilized and fixed in place, covered in a light snowfall of ashes; and, of course, the ghosts—people severely flash-burned on one side of their bodies, leaving shadows on a wall, the side of a building, or whatever stood nearby. The carnage continued for days, weeks, and years as victims of burns and those who developed various forms of cancer succumbed to their injuries: “People would continue to die in ways that people never imagined people could die.” Scattered in these survivor stories is another set of stories from those involved in the development and deployment of the only two atomic weapons ever used in warfare. The author also tells of the letter from Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard to Franklin D. Roosevelt that started the ball rolling toward the formation of the Manhattan Project and the crew conversations on the Enola Gay and the Bockscar, the planes that dropped the Little Boy on Hiroshima and the Fat Man on Nagasaki. We have to find a way to get along, one crew member said, “because we now have the wherewithal to destroy everything.”
This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9798228309890
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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