edited by David P. Fidler ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2015
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
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
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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