A literate, readable meditation on the surveillance state and its discontents.
A provocative look at the culture of intelligence and its subversions.
“The thing on which you will one day focus all of your anxiety is not the thing you know, today, to fear,” writes New York magazine feature writer Howley. Today, many Americans fear immigration along the border. While the majority of Americans loath the idea of a border wall for political and aesthetic reasons, an architect goes deeper, remarking that the thought of a no-wall world is a Protestant one, “an idea against ethnic clannishness.” Instead of tribalism, we fear terrorism, at least the foreign variety, and have built a huge intelligence machine to try to contain it. As Howley reckons, a petabyte of data, printed out, would fill 24 million filing cabinets, and “at one intelligence agency, one petabyte of classified data accumulates every year and a half.” This amassed data is barely skimmed, and only a handful of specialists know enough to determine what’s secret and not. Enter leakers such as Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Reality Winner, all of whom were young: “None of them had hit thirty-one on the day they blew the whistle.” What prompted them to release that classified data to outlets such as the morally ambiguous Julian Assange was partly because they had time on their hands, partly because security procedures were lax, but mostly, it seems, because they were convinced that the data revealed evil. Conspiracy theory underlies their work, but it’s better supported than the QAnon-ish theories that give Howley her book’s title. In all events, notes the author, whereas it used to take the CIA, FBI, or other government agency to ferret out crimes, in the modern culture of self-promotion, people such as the Jan. 6 rioters now gladly out themselves: “Somewhere along the way we had lost the knack for anonymity.” Pair this book with Matthew Connelly’s The Declassification Engine.
A literate, readable meditation on the surveillance state and its discontents.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780525655497
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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