Given the lack of developed policy, if you’re alarmed by the thought of Russian election tampering in 2016, you’re likely to...
“We cannot allow Vladimir Putin to ruin the internet for the rest of us.” So warns the former assistant attorney general for national security in this urgent book.
How much does cybercrime cost? “It’s not like the early days of the FBI when you could just total up the cost of the nation’s stolen cars or add up the amount of money that walked out the front door with bank robbers like John Dillinger,” writes Carlin, in a book co-authored by Wired writer Graff (Raven Rock, 2017, etc.). Carlin adds to a recent flurry of books about hacking, cybersecurity, and related issues with this smart if sometimes seemingly overwrought examination of the battles raging behind computer screens around the world. He answers his own question: The cost is in the hundreds of billions of dollars in actual costs and lost productivity. That’s just the beginning of it. After the first wave of hackers—Carlin puts Napster and file-sharing archvillains Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker in that early group—have come thousands of Chinese operatives, some masquerading as students or researchers, whose job it has been to steal advanced technology for reverse-engineering back home. Writes Carlin, indignantly, if the Chinese army had arrived at a Boeing plant and loaded trucks with carton after carton of schematics, the U.S. response would have been swift, but as it is, policy and sanctions are both poorly conceived and coordinated. The author notes that two decades into the internet era, the Obama administration “was still trying to make sense of the patchwork of roles and responsibilities that agencies had assumed as the world shifted from analog to digital.” Given the threats Carlin enumerates, including election hacking and the theft of intelligence files, responses “created and refined in real-time” are increasingly necessary—but not forthcoming.
Given the lack of developed policy, if you’re alarmed by the thought of Russian election tampering in 2016, you’re likely to be even more so come the midterms—and by this dire book.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5417-7383-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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