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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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