A plainly told, unsettling corrective to the many jingoistic accounts of post-9/11 military action.
Disturbing account of abuse and secrecy at the Guantánamo Bay military prison, tied to the deaths of three detainees.
Proud of his long career in the Marines, Army and corrections, Hickman re-enlisted after 9/11. He joined the Maryland National Guard and was ultimately sent on a yearlong deployment to Gitmo. Although the author had worked in violent prisons in the past, he was shocked by the chaotic atmosphere in the detention units, noting that interrogation personnel were exempted from standard security oversight and that there was a fraught atmosphere of racial tension and mistrust between the Guardsmen and the Navy personnel administering the prison. Although Hickman suspected that many detainees were potentially dangerous jihadi, he was disturbed by the unprovoked harassment and abuse handed out by the guards. His unease climaxed in June 2006, when, on his supervisory watch, three inmates died mysteriously. Hickman was first informed they’d had rags stuffed in their mouths, but the media received an implausible account of a coordinated suicide, which an inscrutable report later supported. Though he was never contacted by investigators, the author remained sufficiently haunted by his experience to contact a Guantánamo-focused think tank at Seton Hall Law School, setting in motion a six-year investigation. They meticulously deconstructed the report and other evidence, determining the deaths may have stemmed from deliberate overdoses of anti-malarial drugs with psychoactive side effects, administered “to break down detainees.” Chillingly, Hickman concludes that commanders as highly ranked as Donald Rumsfeld had decided to use Gitmo as “America’s battle lab,” testing unproven interrogation techniques on its alleged enemy combatants: “I believed we were guards protecting America from the worst of the worst,” writes the author, “…[but] the authorities behind it aimed to create ‘controlled chaos.’ ”
A plainly told, unsettling corrective to the many jingoistic accounts of post-9/11 military action.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1451650792
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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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