Yet more evidence, brilliantly delivered, of the extent of the U.S. government’s dysfunction.
The U.S. government is hopelessly awash in secret information, and this gripping history describes how we got that way and lays out the dismal consequences.
Connelly, a professor of international history at Columbia, writes that more than 28 million cubic feet of secret files rest in archives across the country, with far more in digital server farms and black sites. Nonetheless, government secrets are not secure. “Washington has been shattered by security breaches and inundated with leaks,” writes the author. Global hackers often access classified files, and dissenters (Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, et al.) regularly extract material. Readers may be surprised when Connelly points out that the first 150 years of American history were essentially secret-free. Even diplomats often avoided encoding their communication. A new era began in 1931 with the groundbreaking for a national archive, and Franklin Roosevelt appointed the first archivist three years later. At this point, the “dark state” began its epic growth, which Connelly recounts in 10 unsettling chapters and the traditional yet still dispiriting how-to-fix-it conclusion. The author delivers a wild, page-turning ride packed with intelligence mistakes, embarrassing decisions, expensive failed weapons programs, and bizarre research that has ranged from the silly to the murderous. A large percentage of classified information, including the famous WikiLeaks revelations, isn’t secret but available in old newspapers. Everyone agrees that democracy requires transparent government. Congress has passed many laws restricting unnecessary classification and requiring declassification after a long period, but they are often dead letters. Officials occasionally required to review records for “automatic” declassification almost always keep them secret. Plus, the bloated archives are so underfunded that staff members have insufficient technical capacity to recover historical records. Destroying them en masse is cheaper, and this is being done. Interestingly, Connelly points out that historians are more likely to study World War II and the early Cold War because 1970s and later material is largely locked away.
Yet more evidence, brilliantly delivered, of the extent of the U.S. government’s dysfunction.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-101-87157-7
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.
Enduring the unthinkable.
This memoir—the first by an Israeli taken captive by Hamas on October 7, 2023—chronicles the 491 days the author was held in Gaza. Confined to tunnels beneath war-ravaged streets, Sharabi was beaten, humiliated, and underfed. When he was finally released in February, he learned that Hamas had murdered his wife and two daughters. In the face of scarcely imaginable loss, Sharabi has crafted a potent record of his will to survive. The author’s ordeal began when Hamas fighters dragged him from his home, in a kibbutz near Gaza. Alongside others, he was held for months at a time in filthy subterranean spaces. He catalogs sensory assaults with novelistic specificity. Iron shackles grip his ankles. Broken toilets produce an “unbearable stink,” and “tiny white worms” swarm his toothbrush. He gets one meal a day, his “belly caving inward.” Desperate for more food, he stages a fainting episode, using a shaving razor to “slice a deep gash into my eyebrow.” Captors share their sweets while celebrating an Iranian missile attack on Israel. He and other hostages sneak fleeting pleasures, finding and downing an orange soda before a guard can seize it. Several times, Sharabi—51 when he was kidnapped—gives bracing pep talks to younger compatriots. The captives learn to control what they can, trading family stories and “lift[ing] water bottles like dumbbells.” Remarkably, there’s some levity. He and fellow hostages nickname one Hamas guard “the Triangle” because he’s shaped like a SpongeBob SquarePants character. The book’s closing scenes, in which Sharabi tries to console other hostages’ families while learning the worst about his own, are heartbreaking. His captors “are still human beings,” writes Sharabi, bravely modeling the forbearance that our leaders often lack.
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780063489790
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper Influence/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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