An eye-opener and an excellent job of reporting and writing. The only drawback will be the dawning realization that as bad...
Or, the gang that couldn’t scam straight.
“ ‘Do I agree with the Iraq War?’ Diveroli asked Packouz and Podrizki one night as they passed a bong around….No. But am I happy about it? Absofuckinglutely. I hope Bush invades more countries, because it’s good for business.’ ” You’ve got to like a book that charges headlong in the same dopey spirit of its subject, but as the story turns serious, so does Lawson (Octopus: Sam Israel, the Secret Market, and Wall Street’s Wildest Con, 2012), whose writing for Rolling Stone is the basis of this book. The subject is three stoners from Miami who dealt a little pot on the beach, avoided work as much as possible, and seemed destined for a go-nowhere future until the more ambitious of them happened on a government website listing civilian contracts available to award. A few clicks of the mouse later, and they were arms dealers—and soon implicated in a shadowy world in which government officials didn’t want to know what was happening as long as our allies were being equipped with arms. Being criminal-minded but capitalistic as well as stoned, the trio decided to buy as low and sell as high as they could, turning over barely serviceable arms from former Soviet states to the Afghan army, among other customers. How things went south, as they were destined to once the trio got greedy and fell victim to avarice and betrayal, is the subject of Lawson’s rollicking yarn, which is oddly entertaining: mix up James Fallows’ sturdy but humorless reporting, 30-odd years ago, on the procurement shenanigans surrounding the M16 rifle with a solid dose of gonzo and a pile of coke, and you’ve got this book.
An eye-opener and an excellent job of reporting and writing. The only drawback will be the dawning realization that as bad as the three stoners were, the government is sanctioning far worse in its zeal for secrecy and deniability.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6759-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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