A worthwhile contribution to our ongoing national debate about the balance between national security and privacy and about...
Who poses the greater threat to the United States: the spymasters and their “enormous power” or the leakers “who occasionally expose them?”
Add still another blow to Woodrow Wilson’s tottering historical reputation. As a World War I security measure, Wilson proposed the Espionage Act of 1917—he tried vainly to get press censorship into the law—and used it instead to suppress dissent, most notoriously against Eugene Debs, Socialist Party leader, imprisoned for giving anti-war speeches. With the rise of the national security state during and after World War II, succeeding administrations have persisted in using the act not so much to punish foreign agents but rather to go after protestors and leakers, most famously Daniel Ellsberg in 1971 for supplying the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. Since 9/11, intelligence agencies have accrued even more power and have employed the act and other laws to pursue the likes of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, to ensnare journalists—Glenn Greenwald, James Risen, and Michael Hastings, among others—who convey classified information not to the enemy but to the public. Near the end of his well-written, tightly argued discussion of these and other cases, Gardner (Emeritus, History/Rutgers Univ.; Killing Machine: The American Presidency in the Age of Drone Warfare, 2013, etc.) declares that the intelligence community has become “the unacknowledged supreme master of the federal government.” By threatening aggressive investigatory journalism, by shielding government malpractice, by violating the separation of powers doctrine, intelligence agencies have done more, he writes, to undermine our democracy than to make us safe. Adding to Gardner’s credibility is his willingness to be as harsh on Barack Obama as on George W. Bush and his accommodation of such voices as Sean Wilentz, Michael Kinsley, and George Packer, all of whom have been critical of either the methods or character of the whistleblowers.
A worthwhile contribution to our ongoing national debate about the balance between national security and privacy and about the line between sedition and dissent.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62097-063-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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