Yet more evidence, brilliantly delivered, of the extent of the U.S. government’s dysfunction.
The U.S. government is hopelessly awash in secret information, and this gripping history describes how we got that way and lays out the dismal consequences.
Connelly, a professor of international history at Columbia, writes that more than 28 million cubic feet of secret files rest in archives across the country, with far more in digital server farms and black sites. Nonetheless, government secrets are not secure. “Washington has been shattered by security breaches and inundated with leaks,” writes the author. Global hackers often access classified files, and dissenters (Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, et al.) regularly extract material. Readers may be surprised when Connelly points out that the first 150 years of American history were essentially secret-free. Even diplomats often avoided encoding their communication. A new era began in 1931 with the groundbreaking for a national archive, and Franklin Roosevelt appointed the first archivist three years later. At this point, the “dark state” began its epic growth, which Connelly recounts in 10 unsettling chapters and the traditional yet still dispiriting how-to-fix-it conclusion. The author delivers a wild, page-turning ride packed with intelligence mistakes, embarrassing decisions, expensive failed weapons programs, and bizarre research that has ranged from the silly to the murderous. A large percentage of classified information, including the famous WikiLeaks revelations, isn’t secret but available in old newspapers. Everyone agrees that democracy requires transparent government. Congress has passed many laws restricting unnecessary classification and requiring declassification after a long period, but they are often dead letters. Officials occasionally required to review records for “automatic” declassification almost always keep them secret. Plus, the bloated archives are so underfunded that staff members have insufficient technical capacity to recover historical records. Destroying them en masse is cheaper, and this is being done. Interestingly, Connelly points out that historians are more likely to study World War II and the early Cold War because 1970s and later material is largely locked away.
Yet more evidence, brilliantly delivered, of the extent of the U.S. government’s dysfunction.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-101-87157-7
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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