Well-reported examination of cutting-edge police work.
A journalist with remarkable access explains how the New York City Police Department has set the standard for preventing terrorist attacks.
Though he’s also written several spy novels (The Sleeper, 2004, etc.), Dickey’s day job is as Paris bureau chief and Middle East regional editor for Newsweek. Reporting around the world for three decades, he has developed excellent sources that enabled him to see up close the NYPD’s counterterrorism operations, many instituted since 9/11. The book is a valentine to NYC police commissioner Raymond Kelly and intelligence chief David Cohen, who cooperated with the author. Yet Dickey is not mindlessly upbeat; he shows that the police force has numerous problems, though primarily outside the counterterrorism realm. Furthermore, the author is sometimes extremely critical of the CIA and the FBI. Those agencies, he demonstrates, frequently fail to cooperate with the NYPD or each other and are filled with shortsighted, often downright incompetent agents. As a quasi-insider, the author learned many things that contravened conventional wisdom, and he shares those with readers. While politicians and frightened constituents demonize illegal immigrants, for example, law-enforcement officials know that most undocumented entrants into the United States help keep urban areas safe: They work hard and try to avoid trouble, and after they settle in, their non-English language skills and ties to their nations of origin can become assets for municipal police. The narrative’s overarching subject is the propriety of limits placed on a law-enforcement agency when the dangers of another 9/11 are real, but overly aggressive behavior might impinge on civil liberties. “How far would they go to protect the lives of millions of people all around them whose homes and jobs…were part of the number one terrorist target in the world?” Dickey asks. “How far would they not go to protect them? Maybe Kelly and his team could be trusted to walk that line in a reasonable way most of the time. Maybe.”
Well-reported examination of cutting-edge police work.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5240-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlanticsenior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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