An essential account of Russia’s ongoing attempts to disrupt American elections.
Prosecutors meticulously correct the record on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
The authors, who worked under special counsel Robert S. Mueller III during his high-profile federal investigation, aim to clear up lingering “confusion” about their findings. Recognizing that portions of the 448-page report they completed in March 2019 were “not as clear as we had hoped,” they don’t equivocate: “It is beyond dispute that the Russians interfered in the 2016 election to support [Donald] Trump,” using social media and emails stolen from Democratic Party computers in an effort to boost Trump and villainize his opponent, Hillary Clinton. There’s no way to measure “the effect, if any,” this had on the result, yet “it is undeniable” that Trump’s campaign “organized a press strategy” based on information pilfered and released by Russian military hackers. The authors argue that persistent misinterpretations of their findings stem from statements that William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, made after Mueller filed his report. Mueller cited multiple “episodes” in which Trump potentially obstructed justice. But because the Justice Department holds that Congress, not prosecutors, must decide whether to allege wrongdoing on the part of a sitting president, Mueller declined to make a “traditional prosecutorial determination” on charging Trump. Crucially, Mueller’s report is neither a criminal indictment of Trump nor an exoneration. Barr, however, declined for weeks to publish “our analysis and our words” on potential obstruction, instead releasing his own “inaccurate and incomplete” summary, which omitted Russia’s backing of Trump and wrongly stated that Mueller’s report “identifies no actions” by Trump that “constitute obstructive conduct.” This “fundamentally undermined” the report’s conclusions “and made it more difficult” for citizens to understand what Mueller, in a preface, calls Russia’s “multiple, systematic attacks” on democracy. With another election drawing near, “Russia is interfering again,” the authors write, declining, alas, to elaborate.
An essential account of Russia’s ongoing attempts to disrupt American elections.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781668063743
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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