A dense, thoughtful, not terribly optimistic analysis of the perpetual tension between secret services and liberal democracy.
An expert on American intelligence organizations examines the history and "engages in the ongoing debate about how best to control America’s sprawling intelligence bureaucracy."
As most citizens understand, American intelligence services spy, lie, and commit crimes overseas to protect our liberties. They sometimes do the same inside of the U.S., also (in their minds) to protect our liberties. In this insightful examination of America’s struggle to balance liberty and security, Johnson (Public and International Affairs/Univ. of Georgia; A Season of Inquiry Revisited: The Church Committee Confronts America's Spy Agencies, 2015, etc.), a former staff director of the Senate Committee on Intelligence, writes from personal experience and extensive scholarship, so readers will encounter a great deal of information, much of it unsettling. After World War II, almost everyone agreed that communists—like Nazis earlier and terrorists later—lacked all scruples. Since America’s defenders had to fight “in the back alleys of the world,” they needed to do so with a free hand. Fortunately, being honorable men, they would do the right thing. This fantasy vanished in 1974 when journalists revealed the CIA and FBI spying on civil rights and anti-war activists. Both agencies burglarized offices, tapped phones, and opened mail, with targets including congressmen and Martin Luther King Jr. Both houses set up intelligence oversight committees where “cheerleaders” generally outnumbered reformers. Outrages continued in the mid-1980s when a leak revealed the Iran-Contra scandal and occurred regularly after 9/11 when intelligence services seemed to revert to their pre-1974 carte blanche. Johnson’s sensible how-to-fix-it conclusion—strengthen congressional oversight, protect whistleblowers, encourage civilian input—has little political support. For the foreseeable future, elected representatives will continue to handle secret operations with kid gloves, leaving detection of scandals to leakers and investigative journalists.
A dense, thoughtful, not terribly optimistic analysis of the perpetual tension between secret services and liberal democracy.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-19-068271-2
Page Count: 604
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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