A courageous advocate for journalistic and democratic integrity strikes again.
In his latest explosive exposé, Greenwald turns to his adopted Brazil and the corrupt machinations of its highest leaders.
Having lived there since 2005 with his Brazilian partner and husband, David, a politician, and two adopted children, the American-born author has been deeply ensconced in the life of his adopted country for years. In 2018, they were alarmed by the election of Jair Bolsonaro as president, a process that was markedly similar to the aggressive nationalist trends that carried Donald Trump into office in the U.S. Like Trump, Bolsonaro, along with many of his elected officials, openly expressed authoritarian, anti-democratic, pro-military, anti–LGBTQ+ rhetoric. Contacted on Mother’s Day 2019 by an anonymous Brazilian hacker then living in the U.S. who targeted Greenwald because of his involvement in the Edward Snowden intelligence leaks, the author agreed to receive reams of files that revealed years of corruption by state and national figures. Making sense of the files, Greenwald uncovered a vast web of corruption that was integral in getting Bolsonaro and his party elected by eliminating the opposition—namely, former two-term president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the center-left political leader of the Workers’ Party. Greenwald published articles on the hacks in June 2019, helping to vindicate Lula, but he was met with a violent backlash by Bolsonaro and his thuggish establishment. Nonetheless, he was undeterred. “I believe we righted wrongs, reversed injustices, and exposed grave corruption,” he writes. “In many ways, I regard the dangers and threats we faced as vindication that we fulfilled our core function as journalists: to unflinchingly confront those who wield power with transparency, accountability, and truth.” Though some of the details may not be as revelatory to American readers as those involving Snowden and the National Security Agency, this is still a fascinating portrait of the importance of journalism in today’s tumultuous political world.
A courageous advocate for journalistic and democratic integrity strikes again.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64259-450-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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