A well-written page-turner that demystifies the notoriously foggy “wilderness of mirrors.”
Authoritative history of Britain’s spy services by a veteran who has been writing about “the Great Game” for 50 years.
Thomas (Secrets and Lies: A History of CIA Mind Control and Germ Warfare, 2007, etc.) has a keen sense of historical context and a solid understanding of the renewed urgency of intelligence in the age of global terrorism. His basic argument is that the intelligence services of Britain and other democracies will benefit from greater transparency in their operations, which will reduce fears that the agencies will trample on civil liberties. MI5 (responsible for internal security) and MI6 (the foreign secret service) were founded simultaneously in August 1909, partly via the advocacy of Home Secretary Winston Churchill, in the face of perceived threats from German spies and Irish nationalism. By 1914, MI5 had created a file of 16,000 aliens, 11,000 of them German. By the time World War II began, MI5 and MI6 were clearly vital to Britain’s security. In 1940, Franklin Roosevelt sent William Donovan to receive guidance on founding the OSS (forerunner to the CIA), in exchange for secret wartime assistance. Thomas captures the agencies’ intriguing mixture of formal tradition—caricatured in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels—and post-1960s flexibility, which included a long-overdue openness to women that culminated in Stella Rimington’s elevation to the directorship of MI5 in 1992, as well as use of new surveillance technologies first embraced by American intelligence organizations. Another strength of this book is its depiction of the complex interplay among MI5, MI6 and the intelligence services of foreign nations, primarily the United States, but also Russia, France, Saudi Arabia and many others. Numerous anecdotes portray these relationships as mixtures of mutual assistance and not-so-secret rivalries. In particular, the 1963 defection of pro-Soviet traitor Kim Philby caused decades of mutual mistrust with the CIA, which only ebbed with the close of the Cold War.
A well-written page-turner that demystifies the notoriously foggy “wilderness of mirrors.”Pub Date: March 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-37998-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
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
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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