An instructive deep dive into a system that requires vast improvement efforts.
A detailed examination of the flawed U.S. national security apparatus, which costs more than $1 trillion per year to operate.
Hoehn, research director at the RAND Corporation, and Shanker, the director of the Project for Media and National Security, bring great expertise to their subject, knowledge they bolster with further wisdom from a small army of Beltway experts and former officials. Despite massive expenditures, the last few presidential administrations have often been stunned by events at home and abroad. The authors divide the system into “the warning machine,” aimed at identifying emerging threats, and “the action machine,” tasked with dealing with those threats. Much of the problem is that these two parts have different mindsets, and debate often degenerates into interagency conflict. A related issue is that the national security agencies were initially designed for the Cold War environment, and they have been slow to adapt to a nonbipolar world. After 9/11, the pendulum swung toward terrorism. As that threat receded, China emerged as the central security concern. Hoehn and Shanker identify a parade of new-generation threats, from cyberwarfare to climate change to biological attacks on the food supply. But therein lies the problem: There are so many things to worry about that information overload is a systemic danger. The authors are clearly aware of the many pitfalls involved, and they propose the creation of a series of standing joint task forces to work across agencies. It’s a worthy idea but one that could lead to deeper layers of bureaucracy. Nevertheless, the authors’ forceful message about the necessity of meaningful action is significant. “If recent decades have taught us anything,” they write, “it is that the seemingly urgent has a way of displacing the quietly important. The immediate overshadows the pending. Not always, but often enough.”
An instructive deep dive into a system that requires vast improvement efforts.Pub Date: May 9, 2023
ISBN: 9780306829109
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.
A deeply informed critique of the malicious initiatives currently using gender as a political tool to arouse fear and strengthen political and religious institutions.
In their latest book, following The Force of Nonviolence, Butler, the noted philosopher and gender studies scholar, documents and debunks the anti-gender ideology of the right, the core principle of which is that male and female are natural categories whose recognition is essential for the survival of the family, nations, and patriarchal order. Its proponents reject “sex” as a malleable category infused with prior political and cultural understandings. By turning gender into a “phantasmatic scene,” they enable those in positions of authority to deflect attention from such world-destroying forces as war, predatory capitalism, and climate change. Butler explores the ideology’s presence in the U.S., the U.K., Uganda, and Hungary, countries where legislation has limited the rights of trans and homosexual people and denied them their sexual identity. The author also delves into the ideology’s roots among Evangelicals and the Catholic Church and such political leaders as Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán. Butler is particularly bothered by trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who treat trans women as “male predators in disguise.” For the author, “the gap between the perceived or lived body and prevailing social norms can never be fully closed.” They imagine “a world where the many relations to being socially embodied that exist become more livable” and calls for alliances across differences and “a radical democracy informed by socialist values.” Butler compensates for the thinness of some of their recommendations with an astute dissection of the ideology’s core ideas and impressive grasp of its intellectual pretensions. This is a wonderfully thoughtful and impassioned book on a critically important centerpiece of contemporary authoritarianism and patriarchy.
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780374608224
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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