A sophisticated study of executive tyranny in the never-ending war on terror.
A terrifying history of American surveillance in the 21st century that shows how the government has eroded civil liberties since 9/11.
Most people are familiar with Guantánamo torture allegations and National Security Agency wiretapping, but few understand the legal maneuvering that makes such transgressions possible. Greenberg (The Least Worst Place: Guantánamo’s First 100 Days, 2009, etc.), the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University School of Law, shows how our right to privacy didn’t change overnight but rather steadily unraveled in Congress and the courts. She opens with the horrific events of 9/11, which led to a widespread overhaul of FBI and CIA practices. Their attempts to “tear down the wall” and share intelligence came with numerous legal side effects. The government tested new policies with the arrest of John Walker Lindh, a U.S.–born jihadi with ties to Osama bin Laden. The George W. Bush administration debated how to prosecute him, whether as a traitor or enemy combatant. At the center of Greenberg’s story is John Yoo, Deputy Assistant U.S. Attorney General, who helped authorize waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The author fully explains the government’s panicked motivation for permitting torture and secretly watching its own citizens. Yet the book’s central question is timeless: once a government takes rights away, can they ever be restored? When Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, autocracy triumphed. “[MCA] would allow coerced confessions to be entered into evidence,” writes Greenberg. “This abrogation of rights was no longer lurking in the shadows of closely held (and shoddily argued) legal memos; nor was it merely something ‘stumbled upon.’ It was now the law of the land.” That law continues to haunt the current administration, and there have never been enough whistleblowers to amend the damage. “As unambiguous as Obama’s rejection of these policies was,” writes the author, “he seemed at the outset to be averse to rounding up their perpetrators.”
A sophisticated study of executive tyranny in the never-ending war on terror.Pub Date: May 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3821-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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