Richard Nixon. Watergate. The CIA. Cuban burglars. Put them all together, and you have the makings of a story that still resists easy explanation.
Documentary filmmaker O’Sullivan (Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy, 2008), whose earlier work has concentrated on the assassinations of Kennedy family members, turns to the role of the intelligence community in the events now collectively known as Watergate. There are many moving parts to his story, beginning with the “October surprise” that won Richard Nixon the presidency in 1968 following “a treasonous plot engineered by key figures in the Republican Party to keep the South Vietnamese government away from the peace talks in Paris,” thus prolonging the war in Vietnam and thwarting Democratic promises to end it. The author, who consulted previously unavailable legal records and recently declassified CIA documents, adds that the go-between was the Chinese-born entrepreneur Anna Chennault, who had deep connections to American intelligence—and who lived in the prestigious Watergate complex. O’Sullivan’s story quickly tangles, and appropriately, in many threads: The U.S. ambassador in Saigon figures, as does E. Howard Hunt, the spy novelist and spook who, over the years, played a role in numerous break-ins at venues such as the Guatemalan Embassy in Mexico City and the Chilean Embassy in Washington. Among the crew was a Cuban-exile CIA operative who may or may not have been a double agent for Fidel Castro, while on the sidelines of the narrative stand players with various links to spy services. Meanwhile, Nixon staffers scamper as the tumult builds after the Watergate burglars are arrested—the police having been tipped off, perhaps, by someone inside the agency. Or was the agency itself behind the bugging of Democratic headquarters? Was it a silent coup on the part of the CIA? And what about those call girls and the ever shadowy Nixon himself? The plot thickens….
O’Sullivan’s theories aren’t exactly definitive, but he offers intriguing possibilities in this consistently surprising book.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5107-2958-2
Page Count: 520
Publisher: Hot Books/Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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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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“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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