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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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