A systematic discussion that provides a well-documented basis for assessing future developments.
National security expert Arkin (Divining Victory: Airpower in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War, 2011, etc.) follows up Top Secret America: The Rise of the New Security State (2011, co-authored with Dana Priest) with this report on America's secret government.
The author contends that America's government functions as “a dual system.” There are the “ABCs” of public law guided by the Constitution, and there are the “XYZs” functioning between the lines, “the charter of another realm.” Arkin focuses part of his argument on the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Alerted a week before the storm system arrived, he reports, the George W. Bush administration was discussing drafting a declaration of martial law under the terms of the Insurrection Act of 1807, and the author discusses Gov. Kathleen Blanco's opposition to federalization of the emergency response. Since Katrina, state governors have signed on to Barack Obama's “series of five integrated National Planning Frameworks covering the new buzzwords ‘prevention, protection, mitigation, response, and recovery.’ ” The author traces what the dual system is designed to do and how it performs, given the fallibility of the human agents tasked with executing it. He highlights the cascading failures of the federal response to Katrina, how the system evolved from the beginning, and what the legal possibilities may be for its current preventive and protective missions. The XYZs were born under Harry Truman and came of age during the Eisenhower administration. Arkin traces successive transformations, highlighting Bill Clinton's makeover as an enabler for subsequent actions by Bush and Obama. He provides useful backdrop in the form of discussions of martial law and how such relevant laws have been employed.
A systematic discussion that provides a well-documented basis for assessing future developments.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-316-25124-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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