Former DEA agent Levine's account of his South American sting operation to capture major cocaine traffickers—a sting, he claims, that was sabotaged by the CIA. And not only was it sabotaged, but Levine's operation allegedly precipitated the Company into supporting a revolution in Bolivia during which major dealers became high government officials. The reason for the alleged CIA betrayal? According to Levine (author of a previous exposÇ, Deep Cover, 1990—not reviewed, and subject of Donald Goddard's Undercover, 1988), the agency wanted to keep Bolivia under its thumb: The poorest country in South America was the most vulnerable to Communist takeover. In the early 80's, Levine, based in Tucson, was given a new identity, a luxury house, and a ``partner,'' Sonia Attala, a past darling of the Medell°n cartel who'd made millions arranging transactions but who fled stateside when a $1.5 million deal went sour and the cartel put a bounty on her head. Levine and Attala's mission was the arrest of Bolivian Minister of the Interior Luis Arce-Gomez- -a.k.a. the ``Minister of Cocaine.'' With Levine posing as Attala's new business partner, Attala began calling her old contacts to buy DEA-seized cocaine, at which point Levine was supposed to bust the buyers. Levine's description of this undercover work is gripping as he details the tension of big bucks and kilos on the table and of cocaine cowboys—suave yet savage—making deals while drunk and cranked up, playing with their knives and guns. Moreover, the author's suspicions of the CIA's invisible hand appears confirmed by, among other suspicious disasters, having the sound wiped off of all of his incriminating videotapes of drug deals. Flawed by Levine's endless snarling and a sometime sluggish style—but undeniably the real nitty-gritty at its core. (Eight- page b&w photo insert—not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-56025-064-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
If you never made it all the way through Allan Bloom's ponderous bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind (1987), then this short and provocative book, first published in France in the same year, is the perfect way to catch up with the larger issues in the culture wars. Like Bloom, this reformed French radical provides the philosophical contexts for the current battles over multiculturalism, social constructionism, and postmodernism. Unlike Bloom, Finkielkraut (The Imaginary Jew, not reviewed, etc.) doesn't deplore popular culture, except when it's treated with the same reverence as the great works of Western civilization. Extremely lucid, this polemical meditation on the history of ideas diagnoses decline from Herder's historicism and concept of national cultures, which later transformed into the Germanic cult of origins, and the rise of the social sciences. Classic ideas of liberty were subsumed by collectivism—a struggle well illustrated by the battle over Alsace-Lorraine: Do individuals have any say in their national feelings? Along the way in this grand historical debate, transcendent ideas of art (as Good, True, and Beautiful) also fell into disrepute, so that the two notions of ``culture'' (the aesthetic and the anthropological) collapsed into one. Romantic ideas of nationalism transform in our time into the radical anti- individualism of post-colonial thinkers such as Fanon, who rejects cosmopolitanism for ``identity politics.'' Finkielkraut, unlike Bloom, attends to the materialist explanations for decline—the rise of consumer capitalism and the triumph of youth culture. Finkielkraut's celebration of the French Enlightenment tradition seems a far more rational prescription than Bloom's dyspeptic Platonism. Despite Finkielkraut's Gallic disregard for Anglo-American thought and his translator's clueless introduction, this passionate essay is a welcome moment of brightness in the increasingly murky debate.
Pub Date: April 28, 1995
ISBN: 0-231-08022-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
A call for the civil rights movement to take a new direction. In this collection of essays and book reviews, Loury (Economics/Boston Univ.) examines such topics as political correctness, leadership failure among black intellectuals and politicians, economic discrimination, and black-Jewish relations. But the book's central thrust is that the African-American community must look within for the solution to such problems as inner-city violence and the breakdown of the family. ``The civil rights movement now confronts its greatest challenge—to redefine an agenda created during the turbulent 1950s and 1960s, so that it may conform with the sociopolitical realities of the 1990s and beyond,'' he writes. Traditional activist remedies, aimed at governmental or legislative intervention, have reached a point of diminishing returns, he argues, and black moral leadership should now be directed at achieving a behavioral change that will ``seek to mitigate the worst conditions of lower-class black life.'' Loury contends that preoccupation with victim status impedes this. The divide he traces is a longstanding one among African-American intellectuals, generally ascribed—as it is here—to the competing legacies of the activist W.E.B. Du Bois, who saw equality as a right, and Booker T. Washington, who viewed it as a reward for self-improvement. The divide is bitter, and this is at times a heart-wrenching book. Loury seems transfixed by his apostasy when he speaks of being applauded for his ``courage'' by people whose approval he does not seek and scarified by the outrage of those whose ear he most wants. Uneven, limited, level-headed, important—and, yes, courageous: not to be ignored.
Pub Date: May 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-02-919441-5
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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