Review: Broadcast Hysteria by A. Brad Schwartz

Posted on October 30, 2015October 29, 2015 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A- Reviews> book reviews

Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News by A. Brad Schwartz
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Pages: 352
Published by Hill and Wang on May 5th 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

The enthralling and never-before-told story of the War of the Worlds radio drama and its true aftermath
On the evening of October 30, 1938, radio listeners across the United States heard a startling report of a meteor strike in the New Jersey countryside. With sirens blaring in the background, announcers in the field described mysterious creatures, terrifying war machines, and thick clouds of poison gas moving toward New York City. As the invading force approached Manhattan, some listeners sat transfixed, while others ran to alert neighbors or to call the police. Some even fled their homes. But the hair-raising broadcast was not a real news bulletin-it was Orson Welles's adaptation of the H. G. Wells classic The War of the Worlds.
In Broadcast Hysteria, A. Brad Schwartz boldly retells the story of Welles's famed radio play and its impact. Did it really spawn a "wave of mass hysteria," as the New York Times reported? Schwartz is the first to examine the hundreds of letters sent to Orson Welles himself in the days after the broadcast, and his findings challenge the conventional wisdom. Few listeners believed an actual attack was under way. But even so, Schwartz shows that Welles's broadcast became a major scandal, prompting a different kind of mass panic as Americans debated the bewitching power of the radio and the country's vulnerability in a time of crisis. When the debate was over, American broadcasting had changed for good, but not for the better.
As Schwartz tells this story, we observe how an atmosphere of natural disaster and impending war permitted broadcasters to create shared live national experiences for the first time. We follow Orson Welles's rise to fame and watch his manic energy and artistic genius at work in the play's hurried yet innovative production. And we trace the present-day popularity of "fake news" back to its source in Welles's show and its many imitators. Schwartz's original research, gifted storytelling, and thoughtful analysis make Broadcast Hysteria a groundbreaking new look at a crucial but little-understood episode in American history.

My Review:

This was scary all right, but not in the way that I originally thought. Then again, the original broadcast of the War of the Worlds in 1938 wasn’t actually as scary as anyone thought. At least not that night, 77 years ago today.

The newspaper coverage the next day had all the chills and thrills that anyone could possibly have imagined. And very little of it seems to have been true. Instead, the newspapers latched onto the sensational aspects and magnified them out of proportion, with each newspaper account adding more “details” to the one before, until the original incident became buried in an avalanche of sensationalized but fake news.

Today we would turn to snopes.com to see if the whole thing was a hoax or not. But in 1938 the internet hadn’t been invented yet, and TV was in its infancy, if not still mostly in its gestational stage. Your news choices were the newspaper, the radio, or the rumor mill.

In the case of Orson Welles’ broadcast of the War of the Worlds, the newspapers amplified the rumor mill until the story reached the level of myth – we all believe there was a mass panic during the October 30, 1938 radio broadcast, when there wasn’t really a mass anything.

For one thing, Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre on the Air didn’t ever have a mass audience. It only had about a 3% share of the radio audience. Mercury Theatre ran opposite an extremely popular program, one that ironically starred a ventriloquist and his dummy, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy.

The story in Broadcast Hysteria is itself ironic. While it does provide background on Welles’ creation of the broadcast, the place where this story really puts its emphasis is on the aftermath. It also does a terrific job of explaining what it was that those people who did believe, even briefly, believed in, and why they believed it.

From the description of radio broadcasting techniques, and a look at world conditions at the time, a picture very different from the one of mass, uneducated panic emerges.

One of the aspects that fascinated this reader was the prevalence of re-enacted news events accepted as the truth. This was a standard practice in broadcast journalism at the time. To us it automatically sounds faked – a re-enactment is not the same as a recording of the same event. The re-enactment inevitably inserts some dramatic license to make its packaged story flow. That some of the same voice actors from the news re-enactments were part of the War of the Worlds did add to the verisimilitude.

But even more telling was what people believed. Based on information that has recently been pulled from various archives, it looks like only a third of the people who believed at all believed or even heard anything about Mars and Martians. In 1938, with World War II about to erupt and World War I still a very recent memory, a lot of people believed they were hearing about a perfectly terrestrial, albeit terrible, invasion of the U.S. by Germany or the growing Axis Powers. And most of the rest who believed something thought the problem was a meteor strike. Again, something quite plausible.

Like a lot of us who use television as the background soundtrack of our lives, many people who were listening to radio were not paying attention to every single word. It was on in the background, and they listened more intently when something grabbed their attention. So even people who were listening were not actively listening all the time. And without pictures, their minds filled in the blanks with things that made sense, like a European invasion or a meteor.

The story here is that the newspapers sold a lot of issues by playing up the sensationalism of the story. If it sounds like modern “clickbait”, it should. While there was some somewhat scientific research on the aftermath of the broadcast, the research seems to have been designed to confirm the biases of the researchers, and rejected any data that did not fit the result they wanted.

The fears at the time, in 1938, were that the mass panic supposedly created by the fake broadcast showed that America would be susceptible to mass propaganda in the same way that Germany and Italy had been. Instead, the data showed that propaganda didn’t really work that way, but the published reports ignored their own data.

So instead of a story about the mass panic, the one that I expected, instead we have a story about the rise of fake news, and we see just how seductive it can be. That’s actually more frightening than any invasion from Mars.

Reality Rating A-: The parts of this story that shine are the parts that get into the making of the broadcast and its aftermath. The world of radio broadcasting was different than we imagine, but in some ways the manner in which the news is made hasn’t changed all that much. The irony is that some of the worst changes are the result of War of the Worlds, not the non-existent panic of the broadcast, but the very real panic created by the newspaper coverage.

One of the reasons this book is sticking with me is that the comparisons to now are all too easy to make. In 1938, newspapers were tried and true, and radio was the new kid on the block. While that seems old fashioned now, it seems new again when the book describes all of the charges that were leveled at radio broadcasting at the time. Radio was new, it was immediate, it was available everywhere, and the drastic change in the way that people consumed media frightened people. All the same charges about corrupting morals and leading to violence that have been charged against TV, movies, video games and the internet in general were all leveled against radio at that time.

This is a fascinating study for anyone interested in mass communication and the uses and abuses to which it can be put.

One final note. As I said above, all the charges that every new media rots the mind were first leveled at radio. But one comment I found eerily prescient. A Tennessee publisher warned in 1932 that one day “newspapers will be nothing but a memory on a tablet…” And so they are.

Review: Grant Park by Leonard Pitts Jr.

Posted on October 21, 2015October 20, 2015 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A Reviews> A+ Reviews> book reviews

Grant Park by Leonard Pitts Jr.
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Pages: 400
Published by Agate Bolden on October 13th 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Grant Park is a page-turning and provocative look at black and white relations in contemporary America, blending the absurd and the poignant in a powerfully well-crafted narrative that showcases Pitts's gift for telling emotionally wrenching stories.
Grant Park begins in 1968, with Martin Luther King's final days in Memphis. The story then moves to the eve of the 2008 election, and cuts between the two eras as it unfolds. Disillusioned columnist Malcolm Toussaint, fueled by yet another report of unarmed black men killed by police, hacks into his newspaper's server to post an incendiary column that had been rejected by his editors. Toussaint then disappears, and his longtime editor, Bob Carson, is summarily fired within hours of the column's publication.
While a furious Carson tries to find Toussaint—at the same time dealing with the reappearance of a lost love from his days as a 60s activist—Toussaint is abducted by two improbable but still-dangerous white supremacists plotting to explode a bomb at Obama's planned rally in Grant Park. Toussaint and Carson are forced to remember the choices they made as idealistic, impatient young men, when both their lives were changed profoundly by their work in the civil rights movement.

My Review:

Grant Park is a story about looking back and looking forward. It’s about staring into the future with the eyes of the past, and wondering if the world that you hoped for is going to be anything close to the world that you get.

It’s about hope, and it’s about change. And it’s also about fear. Not just about what you fear, but what everyone else fears about you.

Two men’s careers are at the same crossroads. Malcolm Toussaint, an opinion columnist for the fictional Chicago Post, writes a column that his editor, Ben Carson, believes is too incendiary to publish. After being turned down by every person up the chain of command, in the middle of the night Malcolm uses Ben’s computer and Ben’s password to insert his column into the next morning’s front page.

Malcolm’s column appears on the morning of November 4, 2008. It is Election Day, and Malcolm’s column is a venting of his anger, but mostly his exhaustion. He is tired of all the platitudes that white people use to cover their hidden racism, and he firmly believes that in spite of all the polls, Barack Obama will lose the election because white people will not vote for a black president in the privacy of the voting booth, no matter what they tell pollsters.

He is tired of the countless indignities that have been visited upon him all of his life, and he is overwhelmingly sad that the hopeful future he saw during the protest years of the late 1960’s seems to be dead. He’s pushing 60, and when he looks back at himself in 1968, he sees a young man full of hope that was ultimately defeated.

Malcolm knows that publishing that column will kill his formerly Pulitzer Prize winning career. What he doesn’t know is that his newspaper, failing slowly as all newspapers were failing in 2008, will use his editor Ben Carson as their scapegoat, and fire him too.

When Malcolm disappears on the morning of November 4, Ben Carson finds himself questioning who and what he is. He protested in 1968 too. He marched with Martin Luther King, too, coincidentally at the same march that Malcolm did. But as the scapegoat, Ben is bitter and blames his problems on Malcolm, wondering whether in his blame of the one man, he has become the racist that he always feared lurked under his skin.

As the day progresses, Malcolm and Ben both relive their very separate versions of 1968. A year when Malcolm went back to college at King’s urging, and Ben lost the love of his life over their differint reactions to the color line their relationship had attempted to bridge.

But while they look back, they are sitting in very different positions. Malcolm has been kidnapped by a couple of crazed white supremacists with a big agenda and almost no sense whatsoever. And Ben finds himself pursuing Malcolm and his story, because the woman he loved and lost has returned to him, and been kidnapped by those same crazies.

It’s all supposed to come together, or fall apart, at the Obama victory rally that Malcolm hoped for but never expected to happen and that has captors fear above all else.

Escape Rating A+: This story kept me up all night. Seriously. I read it until I finished and then couldn’t stop thinking about it. I still can’t.

It feels like there are at least three threads moving through this story. One is the current event of 2008. A second is the past, specifically the events leading up to April 4, 1968, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. And the third is how Malcolm, Ben and even Janeka, the woman who broke Ben’s heart all those years ago, feel and think when they look back and remember.

The kidnapping plot seems insane from beginning to end, at least in practical terms. The kidnappers are not the most ept criminals on the face of the planet, or even in the city of Chicago. However, and it is a huge however, the white supremacist mantras that they spout are very, very frighteningly real. We’ve all heard them, straight out of the conservative corners of the internet and the media. These nuts believe that Blacks, Jews, homosexuals, Muslims, Hispanics and every other group have somehow “stolen” the country from white Christian men like themselves and that they need to rise up in violence to get it back. And they intend to strike the first blow at Obama’s victory rally. They are all the more frightening because they seem all too plausible, even downright possible, in their hate and desperate need to act on that hate.

As the present day events unfold, the Malcolm and Ben look back at their almost-shared past. They are both around 60, they were both college students in 1968, and they are reflecting back on who they were then, what they hoped for, and how different the future is that they got. They also look back at how much more hopeful the world seemed back then. The question is, was it more hopeful because they were young, with their future all before them, or did things really seem more possible than was actually achieved?

This is fiction that feels all too real. I remember that night, watching the election results come in and realize that we as a country had made a step forwards, but also wondering at the time what the backlash would be. We’re living in that backlash now, and it’s ugly. The author hints at the end that the characters fear something like this is coming, even though they can’t see the details from where they are. They just know that this kind of movement forwards never comes without a price.

The story ends with a sense of resigned hope. We have to find a way to make things better for everyone, together, because all of the alternatives are unthinkable. The frightening part, for those reader at least, is that there are some people thinking them.

Review: A Vigil of Spies by Candace Robb + Giveaway

Posted on October 12, 2015October 11, 2015 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | blog tours> book reviews

A Vigil of Spies (Owen Archer, #10) by Candace Robb
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Series: Owen Archer #10
Pages: 286
Published by Diversion Books on July 26th 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

A callous murder. A devastating secret. A crime of passion.
York, 1373: John Thoresby, the Archbishop of York, lies dying. Owen Archer, Thoresby's master of the guards, is determined to ensure that his lord's last days are as peaceful as possible, but his plans are thrown into disarray when Thoresby agrees to a visit from Joan, Princess of Wales, wife of the Black Prince and mother of the young heir to the throne of England.
Owen resolves to do his duty, but within minutes of Joan's arrival things go disastrously wrong when a member of the royal party is murdered. Then, only days later, a messenger carrying urgent letters for Thoresby is found hanging in the woods. As Owen races against time to find the murderer, he starts to realise that not only has one of his own men been compromised, but all their lives are now in danger...

The King is dead. Long live the King.

The story in this 10th book in the Owen Archer series takes place at Bishopthorpe, the Archbishop of York’s residence, at the time of the very real death of John de Thoresby, Archbishop of York, in 1373. The events in this book follow closely upon the events in the previous book in the series, The Guilt of Innocents, reviewed here.

In this fictional world, Thoresby is the employer and patron of Owen Archer and his family. Owen is the Captain of Thoresby’s guard, so the death of his patron will bring about major changes in Owen’s life. And in spite of their sometimes contentious relationship over the past ten years, as the old man’s death approaches, Owen is forced to confront his own feelings. He finds that now that the old man is passing, he likes and respects the man, and will mourn his loss.

He is also forced to confront the inevitable changes that the uncertain future will bring.

In the midst of Thoresby’s death watch, the author has interjected another historical figure who is looking at the future without Thoresby’s strength and influence with a great deal of justifiable trepidation.

Joan, known to history as the Fair Maid of Kent, has come to the Archbishop’s deathbed to seek his sound advice one last time. And she certainly needs it. Joan was the Princess of Wales, but Princess to Edward, the Black Prince who is dying. Her father-in-law, King Edward III, is also dying. She is all too aware of the likelihood that her young son Richard will become King when he is much too young to rule without a regency council. Child Kings do not thrive in medieval history. They tend to either become pawns, despots, or dead.

In 1373 Joan has no idea that her son, who will become Richard II, will turn out to be all three.

In this atmosphere of impending death lies the beginning of what history will sometimes call “The Cousins War”, but that we know better as the Wars of the Roses. The men that Joan is forced to choose among for her son’s regency will become the leaders of the Lancaster and York factions that rise in the wake of her son’s eventual death. England will not be at peace again for over a century, until Richard III is killed at Bosworth Field in 1485.

But all Joan knows in 1373 is that one of the few men she would have trusted to care for her son and his future crown will die before him. In the story, she comes to York to seek his advice one last time.

While she gets the advice she seeks, she brings chaos in her wake. And in this moment of shifting loyalties and fears for the future, her baggage train conceals a murderer. It becomes Owen’s job to find the killer, guard the Princess, and provide as much peace as possible for the dying man who has goaded and aided him in equal measure for so many years.

Escape Rating A+: While I’ve given a lot of weight to the historical situation in my summary, it sets the stage for what is actually a sort of country house mystery, albeit one set about five or six centuries before Agatha Christie made such stories famous.

The death watch for Thoresby creates an absolute hothouse atmosphere for murder, although the first murder takes place just before Princess Joan’s party arrives at the Archbishop’s. The stage is set with all too many people having all too many plausible, and sometimes urgent, reasons for killing someone else in either the party or at the house. The Archbishopric of York was a rich secular prize, as well as being the second highest office of the Church in England. Plenty of people are vying for the about-to-be-vacant see.

This is all about power, and by that I mean earthly power and not spiritual power. The great families of the North, the Percies and the Nevilles, want to be sure that the see goes to someone who aligns with their interests. In fact, to one of the Nevilles. Much of this jockeying is about the power vacuum that is about to occur on the throne, and who will be in the best position to influence the expected very young king in the days to come.

Many of Owen’s men, men who he believed were loyal to the Archbishop and most especially to himself, are vulnerable to promises of future employment. Their collective future is in doubt, and some are particularly susceptible to bribery of one kind or another.

Joan does not know all the various members of her party. Someone has been searching the Archbishop’s room, looking for either trinkets or information to blackmail someone with.

As the bodies and incidents start piling up, Owen puts the entire place on lockdown, wanting to be sure that his murderer remains on the premises while he tries to ferret them out. At the same time, Owen is distracted – he doesn’t know who he can trust, and his wife and her sage counsel are out of reach in the city.

We see all these characters at a crossroads. The future, both their personal futures and the future of the country, is uncertain. Loyalties that were firm have become fluid. And yet Owen still must do his job, finding out who is disturbing the Archbishop’s waning days and whether they might intend harm to the Princess. His job often feels impossible, and yet he knows that he will miss it, the responsibility and status it gives him, and the man who has been at the center of it all.

We feel Owen’s grief, and we see and sympathize with his confusion. His story has been marvelous from beginning to end, following a fascinating character and watching as his world changes and he changes with it. The author has never fallen into the trap of making Owen or Lucie anachronistic in order to make them fit our sensibilities, and they are all the more interesting for providing us an insight into their times and their world.

I will miss them, and I hope that the author returns to this series. The changes that are coming will be monumental and I’d love to see how they adapt.

TOURWIDE GIVEAWAY

As part of this tour, Candace and Diversion Books are giving away three copies of sets of the first three books (The Apothecary Rose, The Lady Chapel and The Nun’s Tale) in this marvelous historical mystery series:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

This post is part of a TLC book tour. Click on the logo for more reviews and features.

Review: The Guilt of Innocents by Candace Robb

Posted on October 5, 2015October 5, 2015 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A Reviews> book reviews

The Guilt of Innocents (Owen Archer, #9) by Candace Robb
Formats available: ebook, hardcover, paperback
Series: Owen Archer #9
Pages: 304
Published by Diversion Books on July 26, 2015 (Originally 2007 by Random House)
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Winter in the year of our Lord 1372. A river pilot falls into the icy waters of the River Ouse during a skirmish between dockworkers and the boys of the minster school, which include Owen Archer’s adopted son Jasper. But what began as a confrontation to return a boy’s stolen scrip becomes a murder investigation as the rescuers find the pilot dying of wounds inflicted before his plunge into the river. When another body is fished from the river upstream and Owen discovers that the boy Jasper sought to help has disappeared, Owen Archer convinces the archbishop that he must go in search of the boy. His lost scrip seems to hold the key to the double tragedy, but his disappearance leaves troubling questions: did he flee in fear? Or was he abducted?
On the cusp of this new mystery, Owen accepts Jasper’s offer to accompany him to the boy’s home in the countryside, where they learn that a valuable cross has gone missing. A devastating fire and another drowning force Owen to make impossible choices, endangering not only himself, but the two innocents he fights to protect. The bond between fathers and sons proves strong, even between those not linked by blood.

The Guilt of Innocents is the 9th story in the Owen Archer historical mystery series. I read at least the first five books in this series sometime in the way back, and absolutely loved them. But somewhere along the way I stopped, a casualty of the “so many books, so little time” problem. Although now that I have dived back into this marvelous series, I have some very sincere regrets at having missed some of the middle books.

If you love historical mystery, this series is awesome.

The setting and setup are fascinating. The stories take place in York, England in the 1360s and 1370s. Like all of the best historical fiction, the time period used is one of great foment. England was fighting France in an attempt to retake Aquitaine and the other parts of that country that had been part of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s dowry two centuries before. England had lost almost all of their bits of France during the reign of her son John “Lackland”, better known to history and literature as John I, the evil king in Robin Hood and the signer of the Magna Carta.

Those lands were long lost, but it took the English monarchy a few more centuries to finally get the point. Meanwhile, there were wars. Lots and lots of wars.

In York, the “capital” of the North, its beautiful centerpiece, the York Minster, was still in the process of being built in this period. Parts of it were completed, but it was still a work in progress. England and the rest of Europe were still Catholic countries at this point, but there were stirrings of what would become the Protestant movement.

In the middle of all this change, we have Owen Archer. Owen began his career as a Welsh archer, and served notably in France until he lost the sight in one eye in a skirmish. Owen learned to read and write, and reinvented himself as an agent for the crown, and eventually for John Thoresby, Archbishop of York and former Lord Chancellor of England. Owen comes to York to investigate a series of murders in The Apothecary Rose, and falls in love with the subject of his enquiries, a young widow named Lucie Winton. As happens in all the best romantic suspense series, Owen manages to clear Lucie’s name and eventually marries her.

However, unlike most women in her time, Lucie is not a woman who stays at home and tends to her household. Lucie is a master apothecary in her own right, and is able to contribute much to Owen’s investigations.

But not as much to this particular case as Lucie would like. During the course of this book, Lucie is vastly pregnant, and Owen makes himself conduct more of the case without Lucie’s assistance than he would like. Or possibly also than is good for their marriage. In his desire to protect Lucie, Owen is cutting her off from the most important aspect of his life, and it troubles them both.

The case itself is very loosely based on a real incident, although the problems that arise from that incident are fictional in this book.

A man is sliced with a poisoned knife. Before he dies, he returns to his coworkers, the river bargemen who work for the Abbey. His death is mixed up in a bit of town/gown horseplay between the boys at the Minster school and the bargemen, each generally trying to lord it over the other.

From this inauspicious beginning, along with the story of a missing boy and his equally missing trinket, a long sad tale of theft, murder and false accusation winds its way through York and the surrounding countryside.

One man may be killed for a crime he did not commit, in order to satisfy those who are certain that because he is not pure of thought, he must be guilty of every possible crime. And one extremely clever and guilty man nearly goes free, because Owen almost isn’t able to fit the pieces together in time.

Escape Rating A: While I think it might make the story even richer if one has read at least some of the preceding books in the series, I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary. I’m sure it’s been at least a decade since I read the early books, and I got well into the story almost instantly. The author does a good job of recapping prior events for those who weren’t there for them.

One of the things about this series that fascinates this reader is the way that it evokes the city of York. Much of the inner city of York, the part within the walls, has been preserved as a tourist attraction. I distinctly remember reading one of the books in this series while I was in York, and many of the places are still there, particularly the gates and of course the Minster. It was uncanny to walk the same steps as Owen and Lucie and believe that I was seeing some of what they would have seen.

The story itself does an excellent job of using the skills and people that existed, and does not try to wrench much out of shape to fit 20th or 21st century sensibilities. Women like Lucie did become masters in some professions, and were sometimes permitted to operate businesses as widows. Being an apothecary would make her an excellent resource for Owen when it came to researching poisons and illnesses.

But at the same time Lucie is still a woman who was subject to all of the disabilities of being a woman in a time when dying in childbirth was the most common cause of death among women of childbearing age. She is eight months pregnant, she lost a child through miscarriage the previous year, she is ready to have this baby and she is very afraid, all at once. At the same time, she still has a business to run, apprentices to train and three children to raise.

The case Owen investigates allows 21st century readers to get a glimpse of just how important the Church was in Medieval life, and how the princes of that church were all too often worldly princes as well. While the motives behind the real killer turn out to be very much of this world, and downright mercenary ones at that, the motives of those who are bandying about those false accusations have way more to do with manipulating the church and people’s religious beliefs for their own opportunistic ends.

Owen makes an interesting and effective investigator. While he moves within all of these worlds, he is not a part of any of them. He is a soldier, but he works for the church. His wife is a respected master in the city, but he is not a member of any of the craft guilds. For a one-eyed man, he sees very clearly indeed. And because he is not partial to any of the groups involved, he is able to trace a clear path to the real killer without being blinded by shared interests or family ties.

If you love historical mystery, this series is a real treat. My prescription would be to start with The Apothecary Rose, and enjoy your trip to Medieval England. I know I did.

Reviewer’s Note: Although this review is not officially part of the tour, TLC Book Tours is currently touring the entire Owen Archer series. My review of A Vigil of Spies will be part of the tour next Monday, but if you are looking for more reviews of the series, just follow the link in the TLC Logo.

This post is part of a TLC book tour. Click on the logo for more reviews and features.

Review: Data and Goliath by Bruce Schneier

Posted on October 2, 2015October 1, 2015 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A Reviews> book reviews

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Pages: 400
Published by W. W. Norton & Company on March 2nd 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Your cell phone provider tracks your location and knows who’s with you. Your online and in-store purchasing patterns are recorded, and reveal if you're unemployed, sick, or pregnant. Your e-mails and texts expose your intimate and casual friends. Google knows what you’re thinking because it saves your private searches. Facebook can determine your sexual orientation without you ever mentioning it.
The powers that surveil us do more than simply store this information. Corporations use surveillance to manipulate not only the news articles and advertisements we each see, but also the prices we’re offered. Governments use surveillance to discriminate, censor, chill free speech, and put people in danger worldwide. And both sides share this information with each other or, even worse, lose it to cybercriminals in huge data breaches.
Much of this is voluntary: we cooperate with corporate surveillance because it promises us convenience, and we submit to government surveillance because it promises us protection. The result is a mass surveillance society of our own making. But have we given up more than we’ve gained? In Data and Goliath, security expert Bruce Schneier offers another path, one that values both security and privacy. He shows us exactly what we can do to reform our government surveillance programs and shake up surveillance-based business models, while also providing tips for you to protect your privacy every day. You'll never look at your phone, your computer, your credit cards, or even your car in the same way again.

I should have saved this book for Halloween. It is possibly the scariest thing I have read in a long time, and all the more frightening because it is true.

Two things keep running through my head about what is outlined in this book. One is a play on this quote from George Orwell’s 1984. It’s not that “Big Brother is watching you”, but that “Big Brother and all of his pesky little brothers are watching US”. All of us. Every single one of us. All the time.

And that the late Walt Kelly, creator of the comic strip Pogo from the late 1940s until the early 1970s said it best, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Data and Goliath gives readers a clear picture of just who Big Brother and all his little brothers are, and a good idea of what they are collecting when they watch. We also get to learn all the pesky justifications for why they watch and collect. Also what they do with what they collect, and how secretive and obfuscatory they are about their true purposes and their abuses of our privacy and any attempts at oversight.

Just as fascinating are all the things that are being done in the name of security that actually make us less secure in addition to making us less free. Some of that is truly scary.

The author doesn’t leave us without hope. This book is definitely a call for action, so there are plenty of ideas that can be implemented to address this streaming away of our privacy that claims to, but doesn’t actually make us more secure. The irony is that our increasing lack of privacy makes it easier, in fact downright simple, for those who wish to maintain the status quo to know in advance that we are moving against them, and for them to move against us, with all the power of the state at their backs, first.

Can we manage to get enough watch placed on the watchers in place before they make it impossible?

Reality Rating A-: The text is occasionally a bit dry, but the abuses of technology that it outlines are enough to keep the reader on the edge of their seat in spite of that. Because this is all true, and it’s enough to scare way more than your socks off.

One of the things the author makes abundantly clear is that we are all being watched, as in surveilled, all the time. Having a cell phone is enough to do that. Cell phones tell their carriers, and then anyone who has access to that data, where we are every minute of the day, within a couple dozen feet. From knowing where we are, it can then track who is around us, and from that, it can tell where we work, where we sleep, who we sleep with, where we eat, what we do for fun. Other tracking systems track what we buy and where we buy it, whether online or in real space. Anything we buy with a credit card is tracked. And even if we pay cash, cameras at the store we went to show what we bought and when we bought it.

The descriptions of just how easy it is to diagnose someone’s medical conditions by tracking their movements and their purchases shows just how easily one’s privacy, even about the most private things, can be breached.

And for those who say that there is so much information that no one could be looking for them in particular. Well, that may be true. But, if the government is looking for someone who is in your vicinity, your information will be scooped up and analyzed. And kept. If ten years from now what you bought or wrote today is deemed questionable, it is possible that something you forgot long ago could come back to haunt you.

For those who say that if someone has nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear, the arguments against that logic are pretty easily demolished. We are human, we all have things to hide – from the child who tells their parents they brushed their teeth when they didn’t to the worker who is searching for another job and doesn’t want their employer to know to the spouse who wants to hide a present or a special announcement until the right moment to the people organizing a surprise party. These are all things we want hidden, and none of the them are illegal or even guilty secrets (except maybe the non-toothbrushing child, but didn’t we ALL do that?)

As the author makes very clear, one of the big issues about this push-pull between surveillance and privacy is that we are often not aware how much of our privacy has been stripped away, or how much data is collected about us and how it can and will be used either against us or to sell us stuff that big computers are able to figure out that we might want based on all the tiny details they know about us.

Or to put it another way, we are not the customers of Google or Yahoo or any other search engine, we are the product. We get free search, and those companies collect data about us which they sell. We’re not the shepherd, we’re not even uninvolved bystanders watching as the sheep go by – we ARE the sheep. If you want to learn about all the ways that the sheep are being tagged, and who is looking at all the tagging and tracking data generated by the sheep, this book is a great place to being your search

There is always a question about “who watches the watchers”. In this book, the author provides the answer, and that answer is “no one”. And that makes me very afraid indeed..

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