Action-filled, richly detailed portrait of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in its new guise—charged not just with solving crimes already committed, but now with preventing at least some of them.
When the music piped in to the FBI’s Visitor Center in Washington, D.C., includes cuts by John Lennon, you know that these aren’t your grandpa’s G-men. By Washingtonian editor-in-chief Graff’s (The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House, 2007) account, almost everything we know about the FBI is frozen in time, locked in anachronistic images of J. Edgar Hoover and Eliot Ness. Today, under the direction of Robert Mueller, the FBI enjoys as much influence as it did in the days of Hoover: The president sees an FBI agent and an FBI “threat matrix” report every day, the latter “a printed spreadsheet of all the various terrorist plots and worrisome intelligence the government was currently tracking.” Hundreds of FBI agents now travel the globe in search of enemies and criminals, stationed in some 60 countries; as Graff notes, the agency once “even worked a computer-hacking case in Antarctica.” The nearly 14,000 agents are a very special kind of law-enforcement officer indeed—nearly half have a graduate degree, many are lawyers or accountants and Mueller himself specialized in litigating complex white-collar crimes before heading the agency. There is good reason for this specialization, for if the FBI has transformed itself into a prosecutorial rather than primarily investigative force, in response to George W. Bush’s demand that “the Bureau adopt a wartime mentality,” it is to fight crime at the level of terrorist cell and secret bank accounts. Graff highlights the agency’s work in the post-9/11 world, cogently examining the role of intelligence in international affairs while making a quiet case for us to think a little better of the G-men and women. The CIA is another matter... There’s solid storytelling at work here—and quite a story to tell, too.
Pub Date: March 28, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-06861-1
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“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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