Fascinating insight—though much must be read between the lines—into how the nation’s data-mining apparatus works—and how...
Does keeping America free from harm in the post-9/11 world require that Americans surrender their Fourth Amendment rights? The country’s security apparatus behaves as if the answer is yes—the subject of this official report to President Barack Obama.
Headed by Clarke, of weapons of mass destruction renown, the president’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies allows that the National Security Agency is tasked, first and foremost, with protecting the country from harm at foreign hands—or, in ominous officialese, “protecting the homeland.” Given that our terrorist enemies, to say nothing of states such as China and Russia, have ample cyber assets, the key is to use technology to analyze signals intelligence while keeping the NSA’s eyes on the bad guys instead of the rest of us. Instead, by this report’s account—to say nothing of the preceding revelations by whistle-blower Edward Snowden—the NSA’s approach has been to drink the water from the fire hose, without regard for privacy rights. Early on in the report, therefore, the PRG recommends, “[a]ny program involving government collection or storage of such data must be narrowly tailored to serve an important government interest.” So who determines what’s important? Presumably the president, although the head of the NSA surely has an important voice in the matter—leading to another recommendation: that the NSA be headed by a military officer. The final recommendation among this set of nearly four dozen is rather pale, recommending the use of cost-benefit analysis and other tools to find out what’s working, which leads one to wonder what the folks at Fort Meade are using instead.
Fascinating insight—though much must be read between the lines—into how the nation’s data-mining apparatus works—and how it’s supposed to work.Pub Date: April 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-691-16320-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
