Wilford capably draws many historical threads together but doesn’t make a strong enough case for the CIA’s “imperial” nature.
A new look at America’s primary intelligence agency.
For a supposedly secret agency, the CIA looms large in American public life, an institution that is both admired and reviled. Wilford, a professor of history who has written several books about intelligence services, including The Mighty Wurlitzer and America’s Great Game, delves into the history of the agency using as a framework the idea that the CIA created and has maintained a de facto American “empire.” He also examines the “boomerang effect” that CIA activities initiated in the 1970s and after, with the agency becoming the target of savage criticism. Wilford builds each section around a particular individual, noting that the CIA was originally established in 1947 as an office for intelligence gathering and analysis. Soon after its creation, however, it became a vehicle for Cold War adventurism, especially by instigating regime changes through coups. In many cases, this meant supporting brutal and corrupt governments, as long as they espoused strict anti-communist rhetoric. The collapse of the Soviet Union caught many analysts by surprise, although a new generation of enemies gave the CIA plenty to do. Wilford is a knowledgeable guide to the history of the CIA, but his argument for its role as an empire builder is not fully convincing. The narrative arc is often unclear, and the author takes a number of detours—e.g., a lengthy debunking of Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories—that are more distracting than informative. Another problem is that this territory has been well covered by such authors as Tim Weiner, David Talbot, Annie Jacobsen, Steve Coll, and Tom O’Neill. It’s difficult to see how this book adds materially to an already crowded genre, in which Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes remains the standard.
Wilford capably draws many historical threads together but doesn’t make a strong enough case for the CIA’s “imperial” nature.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781541645912
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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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