Greenwald’s polemical tone does not lessen the disturbing quality of these revelations.
Personalized account by Greenwald (With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful, 2011, etc.) regarding his encounters with Edward Snowden and their exposure of the National Security Agency's program of “indiscriminate mass surveillance.”
The author’s crisp, comprehensible outrage reflects the profound issues raised by Snowden’s whistle-blowing: “Thanks to Snowden’s bravery…we have an unparalleled firsthand look at the details of how the surveillance system actually operates.” Greenwald first examines how the secretive Snowden reached out to him due to his experience in writing about the NSA. After contentious negotiations with his Guardian editors, Greenwald traveled to Hong Kong to interview Snowden prior to the first articles revealing the NSA’s telephone and Internet monitoring endeavors: “He exuded an extraordinary equanimity when talking about what the US government might do to him,” writes the author. Next, Greenwald delves into a healthy selection of the NSA documents, providing excerpts and interpretations of PowerPoint presentations, training manuals and internal memos that demonstrate the chilling literality of the NSA’s unofficial motto, “Collect It All.” The author portrays the NSA as the epitome of Orwellian overreach, "the definitive rogue agency: empowered to do whatever it wants with very little control, transparency, or accountability." Greenwald then narrates the response to these revelations, which included Snowden and himself being slandered as rabble-rousers. The author’s partner was even detained at Heathrow Airport, while journalists like David Gregory suggested that Greenwald should face criminal charges. He depicts these responses to the legitimacy of his reporting for the Guardian as both menacing and absurd, while the “attacks on Snowden were of course far more virulent.” Greenwald’s caustic assessment of this response, and his close analysis of NSA documents and tactics, go a long way to support his assessment that “[g]iven the actual surveillance the NSA does, stopping terror is clearly a pretext.”
Greenwald’s polemical tone does not lessen the disturbing quality of these revelations.Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1627790734
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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