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markkawika 's review for:
American War
by Omar El Akkad
This book totally stuck with me. I've been thinking about it since finishing it.
It's a portrait of someone who has suffered some the absolute worst treatment imaginable (thankfully, sexual abuse is absent), and the various decisions she makes along the way.
It vaguely illustrates the uselessness of bureaucracy. Effective leadership is completely absent from this book: all people are out for themselves and believe unsparingly in The Cause.
It's told nearly completely from the point of view of a woman named Sara T. Chestnut, who by a school mistake early in life goes by Sarat Chestnut.
This was a tough book to read. I don't think it'd be enjoyable to sit down and read the whole thing cover to cover. I spaced my experience out over seventeen days. I would read some until I got too depressed about the horrible people or the awful decisions people were making, then I would stop for a while.
I always came back. I wanted to find out what happened to Sarat.
This is a difficult book to recommend. It is fairly profound, disturbing, surreal, and it feels like a reasonable prediction of what the country might end up like soon, the way things have been going lately.
It is very much a book for Right Now. I don't know how well it will hold up, but if you follow politics, if your Twitter feed scares you as much as mine does, if you feel, as I do, that something profound is happening in American politics and American culture, you should read this book.
It's a portrait of someone who has suffered some the absolute worst treatment imaginable (thankfully, sexual abuse is absent), and the various decisions she makes along the way.
It vaguely illustrates the uselessness of bureaucracy. Effective leadership is completely absent from this book: all people are out for themselves and believe unsparingly in The Cause.
It's told nearly completely from the point of view of a woman named Sara T. Chestnut, who by a school mistake early in life goes by Sarat Chestnut.
This was a tough book to read. I don't think it'd be enjoyable to sit down and read the whole thing cover to cover. I spaced my experience out over seventeen days. I would read some until I got too depressed about the horrible people or the awful decisions people were making, then I would stop for a while.
I always came back. I wanted to find out what happened to Sarat.
This is a difficult book to recommend. It is fairly profound, disturbing, surreal, and it feels like a reasonable prediction of what the country might end up like soon, the way things have been going lately.
It is very much a book for Right Now. I don't know how well it will hold up, but if you follow politics, if your Twitter feed scares you as much as mine does, if you feel, as I do, that something profound is happening in American politics and American culture, you should read this book.