by John Hughes-Wilson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 24, 2017
A vigorous survey with specific case studies and a useful bibliography for further study.
A nuts-and-bolts look at the history and uses of intelligence.
Veering off from his earlier Military Intelligence Blunders (1999), this more technical manual by British military historian Hughes-Wilson gives a solid overview of the importance of secret intelligence and case studies of successful and failed spying, from the earliest times to leaks by Edward Snowden and Al Jazeera. First, the author gives a quick survey of the history of intelligence, specifically in war, with an eye toward Machiavelli’s canny statement: “Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception.” Secrecy and surprise are tantamount to making good decisions, and Hughes-Wilson asserts, “military defeats are almost invariably associated with intelligence defeats.” He cites Hitler’s foolhardy attack of the Soviet Union without grasping Stalin’s ability to muster nearly 600 divisions against the Nazi onslaught. The author delineates the process of intelligence gathering (the “intelligence cycle”) and the difference between HUMINT (human intelligence) and SIGINT (signals intelligence). The former entails the motivations of the spy himself: money, ideology, coercion, ego, or grievance. Hughes-Wilson offers famous examples of each, such as the stunning identity of a Soviet spy “at the very top of the Nazi war machine,” code-named “Werther,” whose intelligence was crucial in defeating the Nazis on the eastern front: the personal secretary to Hitler, Martin Bormann. SIGINT includes code-breaking, such as the work of the fabled Room 40 in the Old Admiralty Building in London during World War II and the U.S. Navy’s cryptological breakthroughs in the summer of 1942, which allowed it to trap the Japanese fleet off of Midway Island. Surveillance (e.g., the Cuban missile crisis) and deception (D-Day) garner their own chapters, followed by the famous cases in which interpretation and dissemination of vital intelligence was ignored—most famously in the attack on Pearl Harbor. As the author rightly notes, technological leaks (e.g., Wikileaks), terror, and cyberwar present new intelligence challenges.
A vigorous survey with specific case studies and a useful bibliography for further study.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-302-5
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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
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