A fascinating reframing of large and vexing questions. Highly recommended for policymakers and energy strategists as well as...
A provocative examination of natural resources, their extraction, and their control.
We give our money to the oil producers of the world, and yet “we find the petrocrat making fiery speeches against us, and the terrorist bomb maker devising new ways to kill us.” That much is to be expected, for by ethicist Wenar’s (Chair, Ethics/Kings Coll., London) account, we are all characters acting out an elaborate script that begins with the tragic premise that any nation richly endowed with natural resources is really “resource-cursed.” In this light, an inexorable logic prevails: a resource—in this book, mostly oil—is discovered and exploited, and the proceeds reinforce authoritarian rule, which in turn increases tension and raises the odds of civil war. “Life was bad enough for people in Equatorial Guinea before oil,” he writes, “when they were poor and oppressed by a megalomaniacal despot. Now that [President] Obiang can sell off their oil, the people are poor and oppressed by a megalomaniacal despot who has hundreds of millions more dollars with which to cement his personal hold on power.” But what is the ordinary consumer of oil to do, thus implicated in a system that is prima facie evil, particularly in light of the fact that, as Wenar gamely suggests, the consumer therefore becomes part owner of Saudi Arabia? The obvious answer is to eschew oil, deny one’s dollars to the petrocrats of the Gulf and the plutocrats of Wall Street. But how likely is that? In this broad-ranging survey, Wenar examines numerous possibilities as well as the legal means oil powers have developed for holding us in their thrall. One of his paths, toward a solution involving “universal love,” may seem a little mystical, but Wenar’s philosophical explorations are really quite hard-nosed, more in the territory of Wittgenstein than Ram Dass.
A fascinating reframing of large and vexing questions. Highly recommended for policymakers and energy strategists as well as students of contemporary philosophy.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-19-026292-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
Snowden’s book likely won’t change the minds of his detractors, but he makes a strong case for his efforts.
The infamous National Security Agency contractor–turned–leaker and Russian exile presents his side of the story.
Snowden opens with an argument he carries throughout the narrative: that revealing secrets of the U.S. intelligence community was an act of civic service. “I used to work for the government,” he writes, “but now I work for the public.” He adds that making that distinction “got me into a bit of trouble at the office.” That’s an understatement. A second theme, equally ubiquitous, is that the U.S. government is a willing agent of “surveillance capitalism, and the end of the Internet as I knew it.” The creative web fell, replaced by behemoths like Facebook and Google, which keep track of users’ comings and goings, eventually knowing more than we do about ourselves and using that data as a commodity to buy and sell. Corporations lust for the commercial possibilities of targeted advertising and influence-peddling. As for governments, that data is something that on-the-ground spies could never hope to amass. Snowden insists that he did not release NSA and CIA secrets willy-nilly when he leaked his trove of pilfered information (“the number of documents that I disclosed directly to the public is zero”); instead, it went to journalists who he trusted would act as filters, revealing the newsworthy to the public. Most of those secrets remain unpublicized even as Snowden also insists that he held much material back. He is good at describing the culture of the intelligence community and especially its IT staff, who hold the keys to the kingdom, with access to data that is otherwise available only to a tiny echelon of top brass. The secrets are generally safe, he writes, only because “tech people rarely, if ever, have a sense of the broader applications and policy implications of the projects to which they’re assigned." He was an exception, and therein hangs most of his tale.
Snowden’s book likely won’t change the minds of his detractors, but he makes a strong case for his efforts.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-250-23723-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
An astonishing true saga of incarceration that would have surely faced rejection if submitted as a novel on the grounds that...
A man who spent four decades in solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit tells his shocking story.
Born in 1947 in the “Negro” wing of a New Orleans hospital, Woodfox helped his family eke out survival through petty crimes. Though he showed academic potential, he left high school before graduation, spending his time on streets patrolled by mostly white police officers, who “came through our neighborhood picking up black men for standing on the corner, charging them with loitering or vagrancy, looking to meet their quota of arrests. Once in custody, who knows what charges would be put on those men.” Arrested at 18, the author entered Angola penitentiary, where his defiance and his affiliation with a nonviolent chapter of the Black Panther Party led to racist, sadistic guards targeting him. When a white prison guard was mysteriously murdered while on duty, prison officials framed Woodfox for the killing despite his detailed presentation of evidence that another inmate had committed the crime. The bulk of the book chronicles the author’s solitary confinement over the next 40 years. In many cases, inmates subjected to these brutal conditions slowly lose their sanity and sometimes commit suicide. Woodfox explains how he overcame those odds despite relentless despair. Through a series of unusual occurrences, public-interest lawyers and other prison reformers learned about his treatment. The activists began building a two-pronged case, advocating for a declaration of innocence regarding the murder and seeking an end to Woodfox’s solitary confinement. Though the author is obviously not an impartial source, that understandable bias mingles throughout the narrative with fierce intelligence and the author’s touching loyalty to fellow prisoners also being brutalized. Nearly every page of the book is depressing because of the inhumane treatment of the prisoners, which often surpasses comprehension. But it’s an important story for these times, and readers will cheer the author’s eventual re-entry into society.
An astonishing true saga of incarceration that would have surely faced rejection if submitted as a novel on the grounds that it never could happen in real life.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2908-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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