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THE BUG IN THE MARTINI OLIVE

AND OTHER TRUE CASES FROM THE FILES OF HAL LIPSET, PRIVATE EYE

Engrossing story of a modern detective, the private eye considered best in the business by his peers. Hal Lipset, who opened his office shortly after WW II, is not only an investigator, but an an eavesdropper nonpareil: The bug in the martini olive was a tiny wireless transmitter (with a toothpick as its antenna) that Lipset displayed before a 1965 Senate subcommittee on eavesdropping. Holt (book editor of the San Francisco Chronicle) is uniquely qualified to tell Lipset's story: In the mid-70's, she worked as an investigator for Lipset, and so he now has opened his case files, meticulously kept for 30 years, to her. Lipset, she tells us, has worked as an investigator for Angela Davis, Huey Newton, the San Quentin Six, and the Soledad Brothers, and was security advisor to the Black Panthers, the United Farm Workers, and the American Indian Movement. Lest he be accused of idealism, other clients included Jim Jones of the People's Temple, Chuck Dederich of Synanon, Werner Erhard of est, the Hare Krishna Society, and the Reverend Moon's Unification Church. Unlike many fictional detectives, Lipset does not care whether the people hiring him are right or wrong, guilty or innocent. ``Judgments belong in a court of law,'' he says. ``Our job is to earn the fee.'' Holt's adroitly written narrative follows a number of cases in detail, and she gives Lipset center stage to explain his private systems for putting together pieces of the lying client jigsaw puzzle, and to detail chases of jewel thieves across Europe, murder investigations, and an expert analysis of the Nixon-altered Watergate tapes. The real deal on private detectives, expertly told. A must- have for true crime fans and other students of human nature.

Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1991

ISBN: 0-316-37161-0

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.

It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0

Page Count: 432

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019

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