An indispensable resource for understanding the Snowden leaks.
An intense examination of whistleblower Edward Snowden that successfully wades through both partisan rhetoric and ideological constraints.
Snowden, the former National Security Agency computer specialist who released classified documents to the media in 2013, presently lives a kind of self-imposed exile in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Should he come home to face modern American justice? Did his actions hurt the United States, or has he helped to rescue the nation from further slippage into an increasingly undemocratic morass? Fidler (Law/Indiana Univ.; co-author: Responding to the National Security Letters: A Practical Guide for Legal Counsel, 2010, etc.) assembles a comprehensive collection of well-informed essays that intellectually probe Snowden’s actions from a variety of important angles. The questions being asked should be uncomfortable for both those who support Snowden and those who vilify him. For instance, William E. Scheuerman wonders if Snowden’s efforts to escape incarceration in America undermine the argument that his actions are akin to other heroes who challenged corruption and injustice, like Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. After all, Scheuerman writes, “King penned a ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail,’ not ‘Letter on the Run from a Birmingham Jail.’ ” None of the answers are easy or pat, but there are definitive conclusions to be made. With that as a setup, the collection includes many of the explosive leaked documents themselves—e.g., the one revealing telephone company data mining. The documents are followed with responses from various government officials who then take their crack at deconstructing Snowden’s actions and their impact. The United States has had some 40 years to contemplate an earlier whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg, and his decision to leak the Pentagon Papers. Fidler’s work is significant because, while events are still playing out, it is actively helping to make sense of this pressing particular American crisis a lot more quickly.
An indispensable resource for understanding the Snowden leaks.Pub Date: April 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-253-01737-6
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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 Yorkerstaff 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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