Extraordinary measures during extraordinary times, documented meticulously if somewhat academically.
A thorough account of the events leading to the Covid-19 lockdown in Wuhan, China, in early 2020, drawing from dozens of personal accounts (“lockdown diaries”).
The outbreak of SARS (another coronavirus) in 2003 had prepared the Chinese health community for the detection of mysterious cases of pneumonia in late December 2019 and early January 2020. However, when hospitals and physicians such as Li Wenliang sounded the alarm, they were censured for spreading “unverified information.” Wenliang later died of the virus, becoming a kind of martyr. From Jan. 4 to Jan. 20, life for the city of 11 million went on as usual, with huge festivities for the Lunar New Year as well as several political congresses, despite the alarming news about the pneumonia cases. “The 20-day delay in informing the public was irresponsible state behavior, to say the least,” writes Yang, a professor of sociology and digital culture at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is the deputy director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China. Despite authoritative strictures put in place over the past decade, and with the ascendancy of Xi Jinping and his emphasis on “civility” and “positive energy,” internet culture and netizen protests had strengthened, giving power to regular citizens. By the time of the lockdown on Jan. 23, when emergency mobilization measures were implemented, people began to take the matter into their own hands, reverting to behaviors not seen since the Cultural Revolution—e.g., the use of loudspeakers (“blunt force regulation” in order to “reduce bureaucratic discretion”) warning people to stay indoors, chanting slogans, neighborhood watchdog associations, and other instances of belligerence, resilience, and endurance among the Wuhan population. The tone may be too scholarly for some readers, but that does little to diminish the power of the diaries, which clearly demonstrate this emotionally trying period of lockdown.
Extraordinary measures during extraordinary times, documented meticulously if somewhat academically.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-231-20047-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
A remarkably thorough and thoughtful case for the reconciliation between science and faith.
A duo of French mathematicians makes the scientific case for God in this nonfiction book.
Since its 2021 French-language publication in Paris, this work by Bolloré and Bonnassies has sold more than 400,000 copies. Now translated into English for the first time by West and Jones, the book offers a new introduction featuring endorsements from a range of scientists and religious leaders, including Nobel Prize-winning astronomers and Roman Catholic cardinals. This appeal to authority, both religious and scientific, distinguishes this volume from a genre of Christian apologetics that tends to reject, rather than embrace, scientific consensus. Central to the book’s argument is that contemporary scientific advancements have undone past emphases on materialist interpretations of the universe (and their parallel doubts of spirituality). According to the authors’ reasoned arguments, what now forms people’s present understanding of the universe—including quantum mechanics, relativity, and the Big Bang—puts “the question of the existence of a creator God back on the table,” given the underlying implications. Einstein’s theory of relativity, for instance, presupposes that if a cause exists behind the origin of the universe, then it must be atemporal, non-spatial, and immaterial. While the book’s contentions related to Christianity specifically, such as its belief in the “indisputable truths contained in the Bible,” may not be as convincing as its broader argument on how the idea of a creator God fits into contemporary scientific understanding, the volume nevertheless offers a refreshingly nuanced approach to the topic. From the work’s outset, the authors (academically trained in math and engineering) reject fundamentalist interpretations of creationism (such as claims that Earth is only 6,000 years old) as “fanciful beliefs” while challenging the philosophical underpinnings of a purely materialist understanding of the universe that may not fit into recent scientific paradigm shifts. Featuring over 500 pages and more than 600 research notes, this book strikes a balance between its academic foundations and an accessible writing style, complemented by dozens of photographs from various sources, diagrams, and charts.
A remarkably thorough and thoughtful case for the reconciliation between science and faith.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9789998782402
Page Count: 562
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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