A fast-paced, informative investigation into the ever-messy arena of privacy versus security.
Pulitzer Prize–winning AP journalists Apuzzo and Goldman reveal the details of the NYPD’s post-9/11 counterterrorism intelligence unit amid the almost-undetected 2009 plot to bomb the subway system.
To account for the systemic failure of government agencies to stop the Sept. 11 attacks and to ensure that all future terrorist plots would be snuffed out, the NYPD began an unprecedented intelligence-gathering campaign to bolster anti-terrorism security. The newly formed Intelligence Division was unlike any municipal law enforcement department in the nation. Headed by former CIA analyst David Cohen, with the support of Commissioner Ray Kelly, the I.D. began operating like an international spy unit rather than a division of the police department. Among the many controversial practices put into place by Cohen was the deliberate and methodical surveillance of Muslim neighborhoods throughout the city. The cops charged with collecting this information, known as “rakers,” would draft reports of their surveillance on Muslim businesses, mosques and social clubs, however trivial, misleading or erroneous the information. The goal of the project was to identify areas of radicalization and pinpoint possible terrorists before they could act. However, despite the department’s best efforts to map Muslim activities, three young New Yorkers began plotting the most significant attack on the city since 9/11. Najibullah Zazi, Adis Medunjanin and Zarein Ahmedzay were all naturalized American citizens, yet they, too, were seduced by jihad and even traveled to an al-Qaida training camp in Pakistan. While Apuzzo and Goldman show their veteran reportorial skills in exposing the details of the NYPD’s surveillance program, they also expertly craft the drama of the unfolding terrorist plot and the race by government agencies to foil it. For all its fastidiousness, the efficacy of the I.D.’s methods has been hotly debated, and evidence presented by the authors suggests that there is no direct link between the data collected by the department and a reduction in terrorism.
A fast-paced, informative investigation into the ever-messy arena of privacy versus security.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-2793-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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