An accessible book that sounds the alarm on how modern technology can be used by the government against its citizenry.
A graphic indictment of American surveillance and drone malfeasance.
International investigative reporter Chatterjee (Halliburton's Army: How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War, 2009, etc.) and political cartoonist Khalil (Mission Accomplished: Wicked Cartoons by America's Most Wanted Political Cartoonist, 2007, etc.) join forces for an account that eliminates nearly all ambiguity from the tale of how Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and a small group of concerned journalists alerted the world to the massive scale of “tracking, hacking and mass surveillance” that American security forces had undertaken. Chatterjee was initially employed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, but as he was making headway into the National Security Agency’s security reach, he saw his job eliminated because it was costing too much for too little payoff. He stayed on the case, however, often digging into his own pocket to do so, and the main result of his work was to show how the government had mistargeted innocent victims for drone attack, how it deceived the public during the coverup, and how often those responsible for inflicting those attacks suffered from PTSD. The moral conclusions here are clear, but the narrative seeks equal clarity where conclusions have been mixed and murky. Take the case of Snowden, who was forced to flee to Russia after he made classified information public. “The U.S. Congress was sharply divided on Snowden,” writes the author. “Some called him a hero, others a traitor.” Chatterjee and Khalil leave no doubt that they side with the former, and they never really explain much of a case for the latter. In fact, the very title of the book is in tribute to the heroism of Snowden and others who have brought such information out of the darkness. In Latin, the text informs, Verax means “truth teller.” The narrative effectively blends first-person prose with journalistic reporting and presents a complex story with cohesion. However, some of the subtleties might require more than a comic book.
An accessible book that sounds the alarm on how modern technology can be used by the government against its citizenry.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62779-355-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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