Necessary reading for would-be reformers and critics of the agency alike.
The battered police agency gets smacked one more time—hard.
Powers (History/CUNY; Not Without Honor, 1996), a specialist in the history of the FBI and American anticommunism, opens by observing that the Bureau is not necessarily shot through with incompetence from top to bottom: after all, a field agent in Phoenix reported to Washington that a bunch of Sunni Muslim flight-school students appeared to be up to no good, outlining “a plan of action for the Bureau to follow that, had it been implemented across the country, would have had a very good chance of uncovering several, maybe all, of the strands of the plot.” Incompetent the agency is, though, and the plan wasn’t followed at least in some measure because the FBI, thoroughly politicized and “politically correct . . . scrapped promising investigation rather than risk accusations that by tracking suspicious Middle Eastern men they were racial-profiling everyone from the Middle East.” How did the agency become so timorous, so sensitive to criticism? That’s the meat of Powers’s thesis, which alternates between praising true accomplishments—the stunning destruction of the continent-wide Nazi spy ring in 1941, for example, and the taming of Murder, Inc.—and decrying a long succession of foul-ups. By Powers’s account, these errors include the failure to track Lee Harvey Oswald’s movements in the fall of 1963 and the bungling of the Symbionese Liberation Army/Patti Hearst kidnapping case in the 1970s, the latter of which spoke to profound public disaffection for an agency whose reputation had been golden until the Nixon years, for which reason “no one . . . came forward with information on what was clearly, even from the perspective of the radical left, a dangerous, anarchic, and murderous gang.” By the 1990s, things had degenerated, Powers writes, to the point that the FBI scarcely had any domestic surveillance capabilities and was utterly unprepared for the terrorist threat of recent years, which “could not be solved with a stroke of public relations.”
Necessary reading for would-be reformers and critics of the agency alike.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2004
ISBN: 0-684-83371-9
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
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