maketeaa's reviews
212 reviews

Hiroshima Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath by Paul Ham

challenging dark slow-paced

4.75

reads like a dystopian horror. the alternating point of views, the immersive descriptions, the contrast of political meetings in polished buildings to the utter desecration of two cities is like a punch in the gut. paul ham masterfully organises a detailed, analytical recount of the atom bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki in a way that picks apart all the wool drawn over the world's eyes and makes the cataclysms for what they truly were -- the senseless killings of hundreds and thousands of people. he leaves no question about it: the atom bomb was not necessary for the end of the war. and most importantly: the people of hiroshima and nagasaki were failed, time and time again. a harrowing story of racial hatred, western propaganda, and the military excuses made for purely political moves, which ends with the conclusion that holding onto nucleur weapons is simply a waiting game of when a repeat of this will happen.

also, wasn't sure how to add this into the main body of the review: what really got me was the moral reasoning the west tried to use. 'we must be the only ones with access to nucleur bombs because we are determined to keep the peace' *nukes two entire cities for no fucking reason*. great example of how america is one huge gaslighting monolith

Hiroshima by John Hersey

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challenging dark informative sad slow-paced

5.0

five stars because of what this work is. there is something so powerful about a 30,000-word piece on an american atrocity published through an entire issue of the new york times. especially when that piece is the kind of piece that hersey has created -- something personal, real, vivid, taking an audience who had been hearing about the glory of the atom bomb into the core of that glory, into the lives desecrated in a way that's worse than a horror movie. it gave me chills imagining being one of those american readers, reading about the impact of the bomb in such a frighteningly human way. you hear a lot of hiroshima nowadays, but it's sometimes hard to fathom what living through it must have been like. this is the exact account to put oneself in that nightmare -- the flash of white light had just been the beginning.

Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by Roméo Dallaire

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challenging dark informative slow-paced

4.25

a mammoth x-ray into the united nations and the logistics behind peacekeeping operations in the context of rwanda. dallaire takes us through the web of the UNAMIR mission that has been pulled apart by the world following the genocide, and shows us exactly all the factors there were in the play. he skimps on no detail, bringing to the forefront every interaction, every aggressor, every moment that tied the hands of the peacekeepers a little tighter that prevented them from saving any of the 800,000 lives lost. he shines a light on the shocking lack of care the UN, particularly the united states and france, had for actual humanitarian aid, and raises the question of whether UN intervention is truly based on saving lives or rather acts like the PR department for the west. he circles back to the important point that as an international community we must stop acting as though some lives are more important than others, that the sentiment of 10 american soldiers' deaths being equal to 800,000 rwandans deaths must not persist when trying to help upheaval across the east-west border.

my only gripe throughout the book, and i honestly hesitated a little to add this because of how it sounds, is that i dont think dallaire did as good of a job as he says in the conclusion of focusing on what could be done better to not have a repeat of rwanda, at least not through the meat of the book. like i said, this is a lengthy, detailed work, but i felt like there were points where details were being added simply for the shock factor. yes, the horrors of what happened should not be ignored, but i wonder whether at some point that the descriptions extend past being used to frame the main point of the failures of the response to the genocide and instead skirts the territory of gore and trauma porn.

regardless, a very informative and harrowing read.

The Power by Naomi Alderman

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challenging dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

a very interesting commentary on marginalisation and brings into question the reasons we are often given to justify why our social order is the way that it is. alderman demonstrates to us how, often, the political landscape and distribution of power we take as innate in the world often arises almost as an accident, as a sequence of events that eventually creates a perfect breeding ground for public figures to sow their seeds and profit from the tensions between the groups beneath them. i think what really interested me was what felt almost like a racialisation of gender, and how a lot of the narrative reflected patterns of genocide -- in particular the justifications given at the beginning for killing men, to make them pay for their 'previous sins', similar to how genocides often occur as a result of one group who perceives themselves to be oppressed against the other. i think this racialisation and the rhetoric that cropped up to further separate men and women to justify their power gap (and in the case of men, brutalisation) was itself a very smart thing to do, because not only does it say something about how arbitrary the sexist stereotypes we live with are, but also how dangerous racial stereotypes and separation can become. overall, this is a very interesting look at power and the dangers of this power becoming instititionalised, but, most importantly, how this power can be made to seem normal to us through a careful shifting of lenses of our ways of understanding the world -- religion, history, and law.

i guess my only gripe is just a personal taste one: i wish it didnt read so... YA-y sometimes? some of the action scenes just felt a little unnecessary and i would've been way more interested if the focus had been more on the sociological aspects rather than that.

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami

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dark emotional sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

wow this book is painful. you know, at first i put off picking it up for a while because the blurb makes you think it'll be a cliché romance between two kids that are bullied and fight against the mean kids at school with the power of friendship. but it is so much more than that. this is gruesome and dark and just so unbelievably sad. mieko kawakami is not writing a story where bullying is just a narrative tool, but a story where it is examined, analysed, along with our own freedom of choice, of how we give meaning to our lives, of what it means to be strong and to be weak. what kept striking me as i read was how young all the characters were, and the tendency for adults to brush off the problems of these young people when, really, the complicated mixture of the lack of personal agency but also the serious accountability they can rely on others their age being held to just makes all these very real, very horrifying situations all the more inescapable.

i loved the theme of the narrator's lazy eye, and the shock that it was so easy to correct at the end. i loved how we never learn the narrator's name, how it was a perfect and heartbreaking example of momose's statement that they didn't bully him because of anything specific, that there was no reason, that he could just be any other boy.

such an amazing book.

Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata

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4.75

Almond by Won-pyung Sohn

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emotional sad medium-paced