Courage and folly, dedication and tragedy: Ackerman deftly captures all dimensions of a protracted foreign policy failure.
Making sense of chaos is never easy, but this powerful book does much to explain why America’s debacle in Afghanistan ended the way it did.
Ackerman, who spent years in the region as a frontline soldier and later as a CIA paramilitary officer, brings firsthand experience of combat as well as a knowledge of classical literature to the story. He is also the author of multiple acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, including Green on Blue, Places and Names, and Red Dress in Black & White. In his latest, Ackerman focuses on the final week of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, when a flood of Afghans clamored to evacuate. The fifth act of the book’s title, this period encompassed the climax and denouement of the ordeal—and, much like the events of the previous 20 years, it was a catastrophic mess. The author tried to help old friends and their families escape, working with a network of other veterans and in-country players. Adding a sense of bizarre surrealism, he did most of this by phone while on a family holiday, trying to shield them from the unfolding disaster. The attack at the Kabul airport, which killed more than 180 people, added another layer of mayhem. “If it wasn’t clear already,” Ackerman writes, “after the bombing at Abbey Gate it becomes evident that the Biden administration has handled the evacuation of Afghanistan with an exceptional degree of incompetence.” However, it’s clear the author could not walk away, and he explains why in chapters about his time in the field, fighting a conflict that seemed increasingly futile. While noting that Afghanistan has never really known peace, he hopes that American actions have contributed to the destruction of the country’s infrastructure of terrorism. Ackerman should be commended not just for his work helping Afghans escape safely, but also for providing a must-read account of the end of America’s longest war.
Courage and folly, dedication and tragedy: Ackerman deftly captures all dimensions of a protracted foreign policy failure.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-49204-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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