A powerful exposé.
Two journalists take the widely publicized case of accused secret agent Wen Ho Lee as an instance of lax security, bureaucratic bungling, misguided energy, and ill-served justice in America.
Taiwanese immigrant Lee, a programmer at Los Alamos National Laboratories for two decades, had access to virtually every piece of nuclear data in the American arsenal. There’s no question that Lee broke every security rule in the book: he squirreled away top-secret information, copied computer files detailing nuclear-bomb codes onto floppy disks and unsecured hard drives, and talked willingly to Chinese nuclear scientists about technologies that eventually showed up in weapons developed in the People’s Republic. But was he a spy? The US government, having ferreted Lee out in a hunt that pitted agency against agency, never turned up solid evidence that he betrayed his adopted country, though investigators did find box after box of sensitive documents and data in Lee’s garage and caught him in lie after lie on polygraph tests. In the end, Lee walked, despite all the efforts of an intelligence community convinced that China is likely to be America’s chief enemy in years to come and despite the fact that China had been actively gathering nuclear secrets from “not only ethnic Chinese but anyone with access to science and technology information”—requisites that Lee fulfilled to the letter. The heart of the authors’ text addresses the questions of why American intelligence failed, why Lee was able to gather information so freely, and why incompetence seems to run rampant at all levels of our government. Though their narrative sometimes gasps under the weight of detail, Stober (San Jose Mercury News) and Hoffman (Albuquerque Tribune) do a fine job of negotiating a path through the secretive, arrogant subcultures involved in the Lee affair: the demimondes of spies and counterspies, of federal bureaucrats, of self-serving politicians, of scientists—and of journalists.
A powerful exposé.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-2378-0
Page Count: 359
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002
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
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