A brief but shimmering model of clear thinking and persuasive argument.
A father-and-son team reflect on two white-hot policy issues, torture and eavesdropping.
The elder Fried (Law/Harvard Univ; Modern Liberty: And the Limits of Government, 2006, etc.) and the younger (Philosophy/Suffolk Univ; Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics, 2000, etc.) acknowledge that post-9/11 controversy over these practices inspired their discussion, but they insist that the principles assembled here are applicable for the ages. Government agents, they argue, descend into torture and contrive to eavesdrop for the same reason—to fill in gaps in knowledge. There the similarity of these two unwanted impositions ends. Rejecting the ticking time-bomb scenario and the idea of “torture warrants” or merely “maintaining the façade of illegality,” the authors argue that torture is always and absolutely wrong. The desecration that accompanies the infliction of intense physical and psychological pain crosses a moral line that imperils the soul and degrades the torturer every bit as much as the victim. Privacy violations, about which Americans have many misconceptions, are different and permissible in some circumstances. The Constitution, after all, prohibits only unreasonable searches and seizures. Here the Frieds are particularly convincing, teasing out the strands of privacy claims and demonstrating that, if certain limits are observed, violations of privacy might be justified in emergency circumstances. The authors cram this slender volume with helpful and arresting illustrations drawn from philosophers, including Aristotle, Locke, Webber, Machiavelli and Wittgenstein; statesmen, including Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR; writers, including Shakespeare, Orwell, Conrad, Remarque and Beerbohm; and even films, including The Lives of Others, The English Patient and The Battle of Algiers. They also cite the Bible, the U.S. Army Field Manual and pertinent U.S. Supreme Court cases. The Frieds conclude by distinguishing private morality and political responsibility, by pondering the dangers of secret, executive lawbreaking and by disagreeing over whether public figures accused of torture should be prosecuted.
A brief but shimmering model of clear thinking and persuasive argument.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-393-06951-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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