Controversial, as Lévy is wont to be, but nuanced, and an argument worth hearing out.
The eminent French philosopher and journalist champions Israel at a time when that nation is increasingly isolated.
Only one option remains to Israel in its war against Hamas and Hezbollah, and by extension Iran, writes Lévy: “That option is to win.” Known to his French compatriots as BHL, Lévy holds that winning must almost certainly come in the form of military action, putting victory squarely in the hands of the Israeli Defense Forces “while taking every possible precaution to minimize civilian casualties.” While Lévy argues that the IDF has taken those precautions, the devastation of Gaza notwithstanding, he does acknowledge exceptions, as with the killing of workers for the World Central Kitchen—a “mistake,” he asserts, that should be adjudicated. As for the precipitating Event—Lévy capitalizes it in the sense of a black swan event that can be guessed at but never accurately forecast—he is unwavering: The death of children is unforgivable, he urges, and on Oct. 7, 2023, “Hamas made no distinction between adults and children,” deliberately attacking civilians and kidnapping and killing minors. Lévy adds, with evident contempt for the defenders of Hamas on the world’s campuses and social media platforms, “I need no lessons on this subject from those who did not weep with me over the children gassed by Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, the children drowned off the coast of Lampedusa in their open migrant boats, the children bled white in Yemen, Nigeria, or Mogadishu.” That may not be a winning formula for changing minds, but the larger point of Lévy’s essay is that Israel stands alone because of both antisemitism and the tyranny of public opinion, with too many people forgetting that Palestine’s leaders “thought only of annihilating” those on the other side of the wall.
Controversial, as Lévy is wont to be, but nuanced, and an argument worth hearing out.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9798888457832
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Wicked Son
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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