by Peter Pomerantsev ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 6, 2019
A work that one wishes would dig much deeper.
A senior fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs at the London School of Economics parses the ramifications and perplexity of today’s “disinformation” wars.
Pomerantsev (Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, 2015) offers a singular perspective on the new forms of influence campaigns promulgated on social media and the internet by mysterious entities worldwide. “We live in a world…where the means of manipulation have gone forth and multiplied,” he writes, “a world of dark ads, psy-ops, hacks, bots, soft facts, fake news, deep fakes, brainwashing, trolls, ISIS, Putin, Trump.” The author is the child of dissident writers pursued for years by the KGB for their outspokenness. For his parents, the words “freedom” and “democracy” were not empty husks. Pomerantsev alternates his family’s personal saga with his journalistic sifting through the “wreckage” of the last few years’ information campaigns to find how the “meaning of freedom of speech [was flipped] on its head to crush dissent.” For example, he begins by tracking the disinformation campaign that led to the presidency of Manila’s anti-drug strongman Rodrigo Duterte in 2016: essentially, by discrediting the liberal internet-based news site Rappler. The trolls behind this effort were traced to a “troll farm” in a suburb of St. Petersburg, Russia, where they pumped out “fake reality” incessantly. Ultimately, its tentacles reached America in the form of fake social media accounts. The author then shifts to the now-famous tactics of Srdja Popovic, a Serbian political activist who is in demand across the globe for his expertise in overthrowing dictators. Perversely, the Kremlin co-opted these methods to “strengthen the dictator.” Parodying protests, creating discord to “confuse, dismay, divide and delay”—these and other tactics have been used in the upheavals in Ukraine, Syria, England (Brexit), and, of course, in the U.S. during the presidential election of 2016, which, frustratingly, the author scarcely touches. In fact, much of the author’s exploration barely scratches the surface, and the memoir aspect is tentative.
A work that one wishes would dig much deeper.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5417-6211-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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