Civil libertarians and security specialists will find this of considerable interest.
A roundtable reconsideration of the Pentagon Papers and the legal precedents its publication yielded.
Assembling journalists, jurists, and security experts, editors Bollinger and Stone present 16 essays and a concluding report by an impromptu commission identifying points of friction and recommending next steps. At issue is the applicability of the laws surrounding Daniel Ellsberg’s delivery of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and Washington Post, both of which published excerpts from these classified documents. The Nixon administration moved to enjoin publication, and the Supreme Court, in “a stunning decision rejecting the government’s position and protecting the right of the freedom of the press,” ruled that prior restraint violated the First Amendment in the absence of proof that publication would compromise national security. That was tested in 1979, when Progressive magazine attempted to publish plans to build a hydrogen bomb; the court ruled that the public had no need to know how to do so, upholding the constitutional validity of the ban. Fast-forward to the WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden cases, and the court’s decision—which essentially holds that a “leaker” may be punished but the publisher not—becomes problematic. One central reason, observes former White House security adviser Avril Haines, is that “traditional media outlets” have ceded ground to myriad online publications such that “we cannot rely on the press to be a separate actor in the framework capable of making a considered judgment about what is newsworthy.” Several contributors thereby support a “new compact” that proposes both incentives and disincentives for publishers as well as broader Congressional oversight of classified information and its declassification. Others argue against such measures as bringing leaker Julian Assange to trial, for “sooner or later a prosecutor or future attorney general will determine that the precedent set…can be used to prosecute a reporter—next time, from a real news organization.”
Civil libertarians and security specialists will find this of considerable interest.Pub Date: April 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-19-751939-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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 Yorkerstaff 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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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