Review of Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2019) The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has a fearsome reputation. The author and executor of countless coups and political assassinations, the CIA is notorious for waterboarding, “extraordinary rendition,” regime change, kidnapping, narcotics smuggling,…
JAMES ZOGBY The Tumultuous Decade Arab Public Opinion and the Upheavals of 2010–2019 STEUBEN PRESS 2020 September 4, 2020 James M. Dorsey James Zogby’s The Tumultuous Decade: Arab Public Opinion and the Upheavals of 2010–2019 (Steuben Press, 2020) takes the reader on a decade-long tour of the Middle East as the region reverberates from popular revolts that toppled…
Islamic influence on European cultural heritage is a thorny topic. Christian bigotry, the preference by academics for Western sources, and most recently Islamophobia, have all played a part in obscuring its role. And so, it comes as something of a surprise, perhaps, to learn that Turks in Elizabethan London worked as tailors, cobblers, button-makers and…
I first read the memoirs of General Heinz Guderian, Germany’s foremost tank commander during the Second World War, while I was still in high school. I have to say that Guderian’s whole deportment immediately appealed to me. Here was a man of great dynamism, loyalty, and innovation; one who understood service and command, and who…
Diana Johnstone has written a compelling and insightful book. It is mostly a review and analysis of significant events from the past 55 years. It concludes with her assessment of different trends that are being debated on the Left today including “identity politics”, Antifa and censorship. This is a book to be read, enjoyed and…
Sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote a book in 1956 that (sadly) still resonates today. In his book ‘The Power Elite’ Mills focused on groups and individuals who help to control this Republic for countless generations: the “Metropolitan 400”: members of historically notable local families in the principal American cities, generally represented on the Social Register…
