Readers should be impressed by Baker’s persistence, and most will end up charmed, however obliquely, by his obsessions.
The versatile author of fiction and nonfiction chronicles his “not entirely successful efforts to squeeze germs of truth from the sanitized documentary record of the U.S. government.”
In his latest, Baker, a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, among others, writes about his work from March 9, 2019 through May 19, 2019. During those months, he intensively explored mountains of documents to determine whether the government deployed illegal biological weapons during the Korean War. To search for truth about the biological weapons, Baker sent Freedom of Information Act requests to numerous government agencies, and he received radio silence. The daily diary pings between the flaws in the FIA—a 1966 law meant to encourage transparency by federal agencies—and the substance of what the author gleaned about biological warfare. To lighten a relentlessly downbeat narrative, Baker, ever articulate and witty, also introduces readers to his Maine home, which he shares with his wife and dogs, as well as the local weather, walks in the nearby wilderness, and other elements of his daily life. For readers who care about government openness, the narrative will be simultaneously illuminating and profoundly depressing. Because Congress failed to include enforcement mechanisms other than the possibility of time-consuming, expensive lawsuits, government agencies subject to the FIA violate it with impunity and suffer no penalties as a result. The custodians of the records often treat the documents as personal property rather than information financed, and thus owned, by taxpayers. The leading villains in Baker’s saga, which he aptly describes as “a sort of case study, or diary, or daily meditation, on the pathology of government secrecy,” are the Air Force, Army, and CIA, and his disclosures are rarely banal but rather consistently provocative and disturbing. Using both direct and circumstantial evidence, the author suggests that illegal weapons have been used against North Korea and perhaps against so-called enemy forces in other nations.
Readers should be impressed by Baker’s persistence, and most will end up charmed, however obliquely, by his obsessions.Pub Date: July 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1575-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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