As Russia continues to threaten Ukraine in hybrid warfare, Aro provides an extremely valuable lesson.
Timely exposé of Russia’s vast disinformation campaign from a Finnish journalist persecuted for her persistent reporting of its brazen abuses.
In this important, firsthand account of Russian malfeasance, Aro shows how she has suffered personally and professionally during her diligent quest to expose the rampant social media incursions orchestrated by Putin and his minions. Her work is especially telling in terms of Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and implementation of its online “troll factory,” which meddled significantly in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Though the author had experience reporting on right-wing and extremist groups, “it wasn’t until I began examining the Kremlin’s tools of international information warfare that a hate campaign was launched against me.” She uncovered Russian cyberattacks as early as 2008, during the two-week war between Russia and Georgia. Years later, she interviewed Andrei Illarionov, one of Putin’s former aides, who provided useful, disturbing information about Russia’s deployment of psychological warfare in Ukraine. The author also reported on a well-known troll factory in St. Petersburg in 2013. Throughout this book, Aro reveals the mechanics of Russia’s insidious nonmilitary tactics and widespread propaganda targeted at civilians—strategies used decades before in both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to gain control over the minds of citizens. Due to her intrepid investigations, the author was forced to leave her home country of Finland in 2017. Though many Western media outlets failed to provide adequate protection, in 2019, the U.S. Department of State gave her the International Women of Courage Award—before rescinding it due to her criticism of Donald Trump. Although parts of the narrative may be overly detailed for general readers, the author is to be commended for both her journalism and for her creation of a damning portrait of Putin and his autocratic, manipulative regime.
As Russia continues to threaten Ukraine in hybrid warfare, Aro provides an extremely valuable lesson.Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-632-46129-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
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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