“An America where people . . . lived in fear of terrorists and the government would no longer be the same country,”...
Big Brother may have been dozing on 9/11, but you can bet he’s watching you now.
The line between liberty and security is thin, writes former Wall Street Journal correspondent Brzezinski (Casino Moscow, 2001). It’s getting thinner, and liberty is losing as America’s intelligence services struggle to catch up with events. It’s not that they didn’t have a head start: Brzezinski opens this bracing narrative with an anecdote set in the Philippines in January 1995, when al Qaeda operatives were caught plotting to destroy a dozen American airliners simultaneously. “We told the Americans about the plans to turn planes into flying bombs as far back as 1995.” Brzezinski quotes a Filipino police officer. “Why didn’t they pay attention?” Now, armed with a battery of constitutionally questionable laws, those services are scrambling to secure a daunting inventory of potential targets; as Brzezinski notes, for instance, most of America’s nuclear power plants are easily accessible to outsiders, and “the United States has 600,000 bridges to protect and 14,000 small airports from which terrorists can wreak havoc.” Given our failure to curb the drug trade, the utter lack of screening of airborne cargo, and the fact that just about anyone can walk into the White House, it seems reasonable to assume that terrorists will find a tempting target—and that they’ll succeed. Brzezinski offers examples of security operations that get it right, many of them to be found, not surprisingly, in Israel, where, one agent tells him, “Even the lowest beat cop . . . knows things that would be considered top secret in the States.” In other words, security need not mean secrecy, pace John Ashcroft and gang.
“An America where people . . . lived in fear of terrorists and the government would no longer be the same country,” Brzezinski cautions. That world may be upon us. An alarming, wholly provocative work.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2004
ISBN: 0-553-80366-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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