A thorough, if sometimes discursive and loosely organized, presentation of a complex problem that is unfortunately lacking...
An exploration of the growth of American government secrecy.
Since the 1940s, a "secrecy culture" has developed in the federal government, abetted by administrations from both parties. Beginning with the paranoia of the Atomic Age and exacerbated by fears of terrorism following 9/11, government decisions and actions have been increasingly hidden from the electorate, from Congress and even from other agencies that need to know about them. Attorney Schwarz (co-author: Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror, 2007, etc.) first grappled with secrecy issues as chief counsel to the Senate's Church Committee in 1976, and he explores the "seductions" that drive the secrecy culture. These include the ego boost that comes with limited access to secrets, the desires to protect turf and cover up incompetence, misconduct or controversial actions, and incentives that severely sanction disclosures but encourage overclassification. He also reviews at length the familiar arguments about the disadvantages and abuses of government secrecy: Too much information is classified, much of it for the wrong reasons, compartmentalizing information keeps it from people who need it, etc. The executive branch and Congress have consistently been complicit in ignoring the problem, hiding behind plausible deniability for anything that goes wrong. Ultimately, warns Schwarz, secrecy infantilizes the electorate and freezes them out of critical decisions and meaningful evaluations of decisions after they have been taken. It breeds cynicism when the secrets come out, as they generally do, too often leaked for self-serving political advantage. The author's concerns are certainly timely, given the recent release of the Senate report critical of CIA interrogations following 9/11. While Schwarz insists correctly that this is a long-standing and bipartisan problem, he clearly prefers examples from Republican administrations—even though many journalists and experts regard the Obama administration as the most opaque since Richard Nixon’s.
A thorough, if sometimes discursive and loosely organized, presentation of a complex problem that is unfortunately lacking specific suggestions for solutions beyond a call for a general change in attitudes.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62097-051-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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