An urgent call for the West to shake off complacency and protect itself from being duped.
A senior editor at the Economist demonstrates that the Russian secret police state is alive and well and watching the West.
In a deeply researched though occasionally murky work, Lucas (The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West, 2008) tracks the historical tentacles of East Bloc spying as well as its most recent infiltrations in the West. In the damning series of early chapters, the author slams Vladimir Putin’s “pirate state,” a regime mired in corruption, for flagrant disregard of the law—one example: the 2009 death in custody of Hermitage Capital Management tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. Lucas then concentrates on the espionage history of the Baltic states, “an ideal base for anti-communist activities.” He writes that he was fascinated as a youth by spy literature and a crumbling Eastern Europe and “studied unfashionable languages such as Polish, and practiced them by befriending bitter old émigrés in the dusty clubs and offices of west London.” In order to gain knowledge, influence and power from the West, the Soviets have to steal secrets; they do so by employing innumerable “new illegals” who have moved to the West from Soviet-bloc countries after the close of the Cold War. The author focuses mainly on Anna Chapman and her colleagues. Many of the most effective “spooks” succeed by their very blandness and ability to blend into a diverse society like the United States, writes Lucas. He looks at the uneven success of Western spying in the East and closes with a fascinating behind-bars interview with an Estonian official who was informing for the KGB.
An urgent call for the West to shake off complacency and protect itself from being duped.Pub Date: June 19, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1157-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
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