A pressing book that takes it as a given that Russia helped Trump in 2016 and will do so in 2020 without immediate action.
A comprehensive legal analysis of Russia’s tinkering with the 2016 presidential race.
Donald Trump vigorously denies Russian interference and aid today, but he didn’t always. Indeed, writes Ohlin, vice dean of law at Cornell University, his open call for Russia to ferret out the secrets in Hillary Clinton’s emails constitutes criminal solicitation, “the most salient legal category for understanding the significance of Trump’s behavior.” Solicitation involves asking another party to commit a crime, which differs from a conspiracy; solicitation constitutes a crime whether or not the party being asked actually carries through with it. Similarly, Ohlin argues that the most salient legal category under which to consider the whole program of Russian interference—and now Iranian and Chinese hackers are getting into the game—is the violation of “the American people’s right of self-determination.” Working under that theory requires the author to make his way through a thicket of sometimes contending laws and doctrines, and readers without grounding in the law may feel lost at times. In the end, though, Ohlin draws fine distinctions between self-determination and sovereignty, with legal implications for both. He also considers electoral interference by means of manipulating social media and other cyberattacks to be a virtual declaration of war, “thus making the election interference an opening salvo in an armed conflict.” Ohlin argues that Congress should address the issue of foreign involvement in elections by “explicitly criminalizing” it, which may fall afoul of First Amendment and international human rights considerations—to which the author responds that even political speech can be regulated without violating constitutional guarantees. The better course would be for social media platforms to self-regulate, which would “avoid any First Amendment issue because there would be no state action.”
A pressing book that takes it as a given that Russia helped Trump in 2016 and will do so in 2020 without immediate action.Pub Date: June 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-108-79682-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.
An examination of how the U.S. can revitalize its commitment to freedom.
In this ambitious study, Snyder, author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and other books, explores how American freedom might be reconceived not simply in negative terms—as freedom from coercion, especially by the state—but positive ones: the freedom to develop our human potential within sustaining communal structures. The author blends extensive personal reflections on his own evolving understanding of liberty with definitions of the concept by a range of philosophers, historians, politicians, and social activists. Americans, he explains, often wrongly assume that freedom simply means the removal of some barrier: “An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.” In his careful and impassioned description of the profound implications of this conceptual limitation, Snyder provides a compelling account of the circumstances necessary for the realization of positive freedom, along with a set of detailed recommendations for specific sociopolitical reforms and policy initiatives. “We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions,” he writes. The author argues that it’s absurd to think of government as the enemy of freedom; instead, we ought to reimagine how a strong government might focus on creating the appropriate conditions for human flourishing and genuine liberty. Another essential and overlooked element of freedom is the fostering of a culture of solidarity, in which an awareness of and concern for the disadvantaged becomes a guiding virtue. Particularly striking and persuasive are the sections devoted to eviscerating the false promises of libertarianism, exposing the brutal injustices of the nation’s penitentiaries, and documenting the wide-ranging pathologies that flow from a tax system favoring the ultrawealthy.
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728727
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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