Useful for students of nuclear policy and intelligence.
Bloodless if thorough account of U.S. efforts to find out what its peers in the nuclear arena have been up to over the last half-century.
George Bush has reason to be unhappy with North Korea, whose foreign ministry branded him “half-baked” and a “philistine,” and with the intelligence community that took so long to find out whether North Korea had The Bomb. It does, at least “a small number of warheads,” avers National Security Archive fellow Richelson (A Century of Spies, 1995, etc.). Two lessons emerge from his narrative. The first is that it is difficult to gather reliable nuclear intelligence; though the CIA and other agencies have many tools and strategies available to them, from spies to high-flying satellites, it is a challenge to chart the activities of nuclear aspirants who understandably don’t want those activities to be known. Thus, while it was our good fortune that the Nazis never quite caught on to the existence of the Manhattan Project, it was also a matter of luck that U.S. agents found European sources willing and able to tell them what the Nazi scientists had developed in their secret labs. It is no surprise, then, that, despite “the almost $30 billion that the United States spent each year on its large array of intelligence agencies, analysts, and collection systems,” a major test by India in 1996 went unnoticed—though not by Pakistan, which nearly went to war over it and which shortly afterward conducted a nuclear test of its own. The second lesson, a corollary to the first, is that much of the interpretation of gathered data has itself been unreliable, as demonstrated by the U.S.’s WMD embarrassment in Iraq. Still, Richelson suggests, there was plenty reason to think that Saddam Hussein’s regime aspired to develop nuclear weapons, even if it was incapable of doing so. Though somewhat clinical and academic, Richelson’s text is certainly full of tense and suspenseful turns.
Useful for students of nuclear policy and intelligence.Pub Date: March 13, 2006
ISBN: 0-393-05383-0
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Bibliophiles will love this fact-filled, bookish journey.
An engaging, casual history of librarians and libraries and a famous one that burned down.
In her latest, New Yorker staff writer Orlean (Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, 2011, etc.) seeks to “tell about a place I love that doesn’t belong to me but feels like it is mine.” It’s the story of the Los Angeles Public Library, poet Charles Bukowski’s “wondrous place,” and what happened to it on April 29, 1986: It burned down. The fire raged “for more than seven hours and reached temperatures of 2000 degrees…more than one million books were burned or damaged.” Though nobody was killed, 22 people were injured, and it took more than 3 million gallons of water to put it out. One of the firefighters on the scene said, “We thought we were looking at the bowels of hell….It was surreal.” Besides telling the story of the historic library and its destruction, the author recounts the intense arson investigation and provides an in-depth biography of the troubled young man who was arrested for starting it, actor Harry Peak. Orlean reminds us that library fires have been around since the Library of Alexandria; during World War II, “the Nazis alone destroyed an estimated hundred million books.” She continues, “destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never happened.” The author also examines the library’s important role in the city since 1872 and the construction of the historic Goodhue Building in 1926. Orlean visited the current library and talked to many of the librarians, learning about their jobs and responsibilities, how libraries were a “solace in the Depression,” and the ongoing problems librarians face dealing with the homeless. The author speculates about Peak’s guilt but remains “confounded.” Maybe it was just an accident after all.
Bibliophiles will love this fact-filled, bookish journey.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4018-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
PERSPECTIVES
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
Despite its glaring absence of women philosophers, Grayling’s accessible omnibus will provide a steppingstone for the...
A magnificent recapping of the history of philosophy, as it stands apart from theology, in the classic model of Bertrand Russell, as “an invitation and an entrance.”
In the hands of British scholar and journalist Grayling (Master/New Coll. of the Humanities; Democracy and Its Crisis, 2018, etc.), it is a delight to engage in this sweeping history of the great thinkers throughout the ages, from pre-Socratics to the present. Moreover, in the last section of the book, the author offers a considerably shorter yet fair introduction to Indian, Chinese, Arabic-Persian, and African philosophy (hindered only by the “veil” of language, yet he ends with a challenge to readers to address this surmountable difficulty). The attempt to “make sense of things” has plagued humanity for centuries and has also led to its great advances, especially the “rise of modern thought” in terms of empiricism and rationalism as they gained momentum from the 17th century. These great forces unharnessed philosophy from the strictures of religion, culminating in the essential concept, particularly by Immanuel Kant and his fellow Enlightenment thinkers, that the “autonomy” of man meant “self-government, independence of thought, and possession of the right and the responsibility to make choices about one’s own life.” As Grayling notes, this is “essential to the life worth living,” a matter dear to the very “first” philosophers: Thales, who relied on observation and reason to “know thyself,” and Socrates, for whom the first great question was how to live. As he moves into the more recondite reaches of “analytic” and language philosophy of the 20th century, the author mostly keeps the narrative from becoming overly academic. Unfortunately, there is a disturbing lack of women philosophers across Grayling’s 2,500-year survey, even under the cursory rubric of “feminist philosophy.” The author’s approach is especially refreshing due to his acknowledgement that few philosophers were truly unique (even Buddha or Confucius); often what was required for lasting significance was a kind of luck and a stable of devoted followers.
Despite its glaring absence of women philosophers, Grayling’s accessible omnibus will provide a steppingstone for the student or novice.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9848-7874-8
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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