There’s no good news in this book, which both admonishes and forewarns. Somber but necessary reading for those interested in...
Of partisans, trolls, and spooks: a stern dissection of the 2016 election.
Exactly who planned and executed the Russian hacking of the 2016 election is not yet wholly known outside cybercrime circles, but it’s clear that the beneficiary was Donald Trump. As Jamieson (Chair, Annenberg Public Policy Center/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Electing the President, 2012: The Insiders' View, 2013, etc.) writes, if you were to war-game out that cybercrime, you’d wind up with numerous scenarios. Only one is truly negative to the Russians: “The cyberattackers are unmasked by a vigilant intelligence community, condemned by those in both major political parties…the Russian messaging…blocked or labeled a Russian propaganda,” sanctions put in place, and so on. That did not happen. Characterizing the hacking not as “interference” or “meddling” but as an act of cyberwar demanding proportional response, Jamieson surveys the damage: Millions of Americans swallowed Russian-generated lies and went at each other even as the “electoral systems of twenty-one states by one count and thirty-nine by another were hacked.” Allowing that it wasn’t Russians but American voters (and the Electoral College) who put Trump in office, the author performs an after-battle analysis of the “social disruption,” with hackers hooking former FBI Director James Comey into reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails and even gaming the presidential debates. Jamieson is clear on why the Russians would have targeted Clinton; she is just as clear that the “legacy media” failed in their task and swallowed narrative lines whole—attributing misinformation to WikiLeaks, for one, and not “St. Petersburg,” bypassing any discussion of Russian involvement until well after the fact. Chalking up the knowns and unknowns, the author concludes that by commission on one hand and omission on the other, both of the leading nominees "increased our collective vulnerability to Russian machinations in very different ways”—machinations, she adds, that aren’t likely to stop.
There’s no good news in this book, which both admonishes and forewarns. Somber but necessary reading for those interested in the democratic process and its enemies.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-19-091581-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
PERSPECTIVES
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