It will be left to other books to argue whether WikiLeaks is right or wrong in their mission and approach. This one gives...
Parsing the nearly 2.5 million diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks.
This work is nominally a collection of independent analyses written by a variety of journalists, academics, and public thinkers. Their essays, however, are based on the massive amount of classified information, mostly State Department cables, published by the controversial nonprofit WikiLeaks. With an introduction by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, in exile in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and contributions by people like Sarah Harrison, the editor who helped spirit away Edward Snowden to Moscow, this collection qualifies as the only overview of this material that is sanctioned by the organization. As such, the book strongly echoes the philosophy and values espoused by WikiLeaks. Assange contributes a characteristically intelligent introduction, saying of the cables, “reading them is a much more effective way of understanding an institution like the State Department than reading reports by journalists on the public pronouncements of Hillary Clinton, or [White House Communications Director] Jen Psaki.” A triptych of fiercely critical essays follows, focusing on America’s character as an imperial power, the influence of the WikiLeaks materials on the war on terror, and America’s economic policies as a rationale for intervention in foreign countries. Surprisingly, the most useful and clearly written chapter is almost devoid of secrets. In “Indexing the Empire,” WikiLeaks section editor Harrison provides a clear-cut guide to searching and analyzing the documents in their archive. “Our work is dedicated to making sure history belongs to everyone,” she writes, “not just to elite organizations and their counterparts in the news industry.” The remaining chapters each take a deep dive into what the cables reveal about America’s dealings with a variety of states including Israel, Iran, Afghanistan, and Russia, among other hot spots.
It will be left to other books to argue whether WikiLeaks is right or wrong in their mission and approach. This one gives solid context to the cables themselves, explaining what they mean to the wider world.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78168-874-8
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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