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As a former student of Professor Paul Butler, I was not surprised to find his book refreshing in its candor, raw in its emotion, and revolutionary in its outlook. At bottom, Professor Butler's analysis is grounded in the radical notion that the government should respect people's right to be secure in their persons and property, a right formerly enshrined in the Fourth Amendment. Even more fundamentally, he argues that we should re-embrace freedom in this country in ways that range from not incarcerating nonviolent offenders to decriminalizing drugs. Our prisons, he points out, have made our lives more dangerous by serving to indoctrinate nonviolent offenders in the ways of violent crime. Not only are we squandering lives that might otherwise be productive, but we are also creating a contempt for law not seen since Prohibition and extending police power in a manner not consistent with a free society.

Ironically, Butler points out that prosecutorial bullying coupled with the indiscriminate use of paid informants ("snitches") has radically undermined the rule of law. Indiscriminate prosecution leads to a fatalistic attitude in some communities that come to regard prosecution more as an inevitable misfortune than an avoidable sanction. Paid informants not only undermine community trust and generate false information, but they also allow some of the worst offenders to carry on a life of crime in the knowledge that the police will protect and excuse their paid informers.

As the book's title suggests, Butler derives a series of principles for approaching the problems of criminal justice that are derived from hip hop culture. No disrespect, but I am about as familiar with hip hop as I am with Russian folk dancing, which is to say, not very. Yet given the immediacy of a genre like hip hop on today's streets and among today's youth, it is all the more necessary to read books like Butler's that serve as a bridge to new ideas. Butler's ideas about selective noncooperation with the police may raise an eyebrow in some, but mostly they constitute standard advice for anyone on the wrong end of an inquiry by law enforcement: do not consent to a search, ask for a lawyer, say nothing more until you have one. Even Butler's signature advocacy of jury nullification in cases of non-violent drug offenses is hardly a notion that would shock James Madison.

Later in the book, Butler raises questions about the possible uses of technology in providing alternatives to mass incarceration. However, he does not attempt to answer them, much less address the broad implications of placing intrusive monitoring devices in the hands of the bullying police and prosecutors he so eloquently decries elsewhere. Such a discussion deserves at least a book of its own, preferably one that examines the commoditization of information technology as a counterweight to Big Brother.

Butler concludes the book with a series of suggestions for citizen action with which anyone who believes we can shape our culture by improving our environment should find themselves in immediate sympathy. While in some ways a pastiche of personal memoir, social analysis, legal primer, and citizen handbook, this book is a compelling read and a call to action for anyone who has ever had a moment's concern about crime or racial justice in America.

Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers is uplifting because it promises us we can master our destinies. What at first blush might correctly be seen as a debunking of the notion that genius is the sole product of mysterious innate ability is also a celebration of the confluence of natural ability, unusual opportunity, dedicated practice and good fortune that has produced such prodigious individuals as Bill Gates, Bill Joy, Steve Jobs, Canada's hockey champions, classical musicians, Asian math champions, New York's Jewish lawyers, and even a bestselling half-Jamaican Canadian author.

An essential ingredient in Gladwell's recipe for genius is hard work, at least 10,000 hours of practice before one reaches true proficiency in any discipline. A predicate for that kind of practice, however, is not merely inner discipline but opportunity. Bill Joy and Bill Gates had rare opportunities in the form of essentially unlimited free access to programming time on computers at a time when such access was a rare commodity. Coupled with this rare access in their youth, they along with most other household names in the computer industry were able to gain such extraordinary experience at just the moment when the computer industry was undergoing a tectonic shift from the clunky batch-programmed mainframes that had hitherto dominated the industry to the revolutionary light personal computers that represented the future. A few years earlier and they would have been wedded to the mainframe dinosaurs of the past, a few years later and they would they would have been too late to play a critical role in shaping the future and would simply have joined the herd rather than leading the charge.

Gladwell's conclusion is that once we dispense with the notion that genius is spontaneous, innate, and mysterious, we are liberated to cultivate it. To be sure, not every seed will grow to be a Giant Sequoia, but even the seeds of the Giant Sequoia will come to nothing if they are cast upon dry stone. And Gladwell broadens his analysis to include not merely a condemnation of lack of opportunity, but also a critique of culture. In successive examples, he shows that the occupations cultures pursue, the hardships they suffer, and even the syntax of their language and content of their manners can have a critical effect on their economic success, job performance, or intellectual achievement. Far from succumbing to a crude determinism, however, Gladwell holds forth the possibility that by enriching our children's opportunities and examining our thinking, we can create the conditions necessary for civilization to flourish in new abundance.

In this superb short novel, Laila Lalami deftly limns the rise and fall of Youssef El Mekki, unacknowledged bastard son of prominent businessman, disillusioned activist, and bon vivant Nabil El Amrani. Seemingly sprung from the trap of the Casablanca slums when he learns that his father, far from being dead, is in fact a Moroccan tycoon, Youssef is soon caught in a complex web of familial and political intrigue. A mark of this novel's quality is its ability to portray what for many Americans is the mildly exotic culture of Morocco while also convincingly revealing the ways in which both Americans and Moroccans are enmeshed in their own cultural contexts (a point illustrated in another fashion by Malcolm Gladwell's recent Outliers). While each character acts as though autonomously, behind the apparently simple interactions between the characters lies a complex web of human relationships, cultural relationships, and sometimes sinister motivations, which Lalami gradually unveils. Lalami's lean style, unsparing eye, and tight construction mean not a word is wasted in this elegant depiction of the book's all too human characters and its damning indictment of the cruel forces that manipulate them.

Standing in front of the smoking ruins of the bombed dwelling lately occupied by your wife and newborn daughter before a seething mob crying out to avenge you is a powerful test of a man's character. On January 30, 1956, Martin Luther King's house was bombed during the Montgomery Bus Boycott; his wife Coretta and daughter Yolanda barely escaped the blast. After the bombing, the house was ringed by a thin line of white policemen in imminent fear of attack by a much larger African American crowd. Appearing before the crowd, King had first to show them that Coretta and Yoki were unharmed before they would let him speak. Addressing the crowd, King reminded them that his movement was founded upon nonviolence, urged them to disband, go home, and pray, and told them that he would see them at the next mass meeting to support the boycott.

For me, that is the defining moment of Taylor Branch's first thousand pages on the history of Dr. King and his movement: Parting the Waters. The entirely human response would have been to order the summary execution of any white person in sight after one's house had been bombed and one's family nearly killed. To our benefit and his everlasting credit, Dr. King was able to rise above the normal human response and live up to the true meaning of his creed.

Branch's book is by no means a hagiography, however. As it gallops through a thousand pages of burnings, bombings, knifings, shootings, hangings, and mass protests met by police attack dogs and high-powered fire hoses, Branch's book also captures the very human side of King the icon. How many people realize, after all, that the great civil rights leader was born "Mike King, Jr.," a name he retained among his closest associates, that he had a passion for soul food, or that he was an accomplished pool player? From the intrigue within the Baptist Church to the fundraising problems of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Branch effectively conveys a picture not only of the dramatic highlights but also of the tumultuous inner life of the movement.

King is by no means the only luminous figure in this first volume of Branch's trilogy, which sharply limns the generosity of Harry Belafonte, who virtually bankrolled the movement, the quixotic idealism and complicated personal life of Bayard Rustin, the quiet courage of Bob Moses, the fiery sermons of James Bevel, and the unflinching courage of John Lewis. At the same time, it also paints the vacillation and political calculation of the Kennedys and the monomania of J. Edgar Hoover. Indeed, even Eugene "Bull" Connor seems to have human qualities compared to the demonic intensity and Machiavellian scheming of the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose anti-Communist fantasies not only led him to persecute the Civil Rights movement but also to ignore the real dangers of organized crime.

As the book closes with the March on Washington and the assassination of JFK, one looks forward to climbing the mountaintop at an ever accelerating pace in the two subsequent volumes.

It is a peculiar feeling to read a painstakingly detailed, fully-indexed 604-page biography and get the feeling that the author has simultaneously a pathological aversion to his subject and an irresistible fascination with him. Tom Wells chronicles in depth Daniel Ellsberg's strained relationship with his mother, who died young in a tragic family car crash. He dwells on examples of Ellsberg's self-centeredness, his lasciviousness, his womanizing, his vanity, his procrastination, his social alienation, and the spiraling irrelevance of his later years. Wells even repeatedly seeks to downplay the significance of Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers, the ultra-secret Rand Corporation study of government deception of the public during the Vietnam War that made Ellsberg a household word when he released it to the New York Times.

While I am not one to assume that whistleblowers, much less perhaps the greatest whistleblower of all time, are plaster saints, I am a little put off by the degree of Tom Wells' antipathy toward his subject. To be fair, I have never met Daniel Ellsberg. I do think Ellsberg was tormented by the war, and possibly by his complicity in it. I would not be surprised if he had some personal demons or made some reckless choices. Nevertheless, he remains a man whom I admire intensely, because he did have the courage to stand up and expose the lies of the most powerful government on earth.

Moreover, for all the flaws in this long book, the writing is crisp and there are many moments of intense drama, my favorites being the antics of the Chuck Colson and the White House plumbers on behalf of the troglodytic Richard Nixon and Ellsberg's mad cross country campaign to elude the FBI. In a national game of whack-a-mole, the Department of Justice would secure an injunction against one paper seeking to publish the papers, only to have two more copies pop up in different papers across the country. Among his other accomplishments, Ellsberg's act led directly to the decision in New York Times v. Sullivan that the government could not under the First Amendment impose prior restraints on the press to prevent publication of material, such as the Pentagon Papers, to the release of which it objected.

The final word on this book is that it is a critical biography in a good sense. It thoroughly examines its subject, stripping away myths, scrutinizing flaws. It is hard to believe that there is a wart on its subject that is not put under the magnifying glass. And yet, it also attempts to give us the measure of Ellsberg the man, and I think it succeeds in spite of itself. By that I mean that despite the author's professed low opinion of Ellsberg, and studious attempts at documenting it, I find it hard not to think of Ellsberg as a (flawed) giant of our times. More than can be said, perhaps, of his nemesis, Richard Nixon.

John Adams famously described the American government as one of "laws, not of men." In eight years, the Bush Administration has reacted to the attacks of September 11, 2001, by turning that dictum on its head in their zeal to ensure that another attack does not occur on their watch. In particular, the President's confidence that he is a "good man," has led him to embrace the advice of a ruthless cabal within the United States government whose first article of faith is that there are no limitations on presidential power in a "time of war."

Jane Mayer's excellent book on the prosecution of the so-called "War on Terror" is a "must read" not primarily because it reveals new information: many of the facts have already been exposed in the nation's media, including in some of Mayer's own articles for the New Yorker. Rather, this book adds two essential dimensions to the national debate on the government's actions. First, it describes the political and legal decisions of the White House, the Vice President's Office, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and the Attorney General to reinterpret, and subvert, the Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, and the criminal statutes of the United States with horrific consequences. Second, in describing those consequences, it paints a far more vivid picture of the gruesome consequences of the torture policy than the press's usual glib invocation of "water boarding."

As the book describes, Vice President Dick Cheney's unprecedented ability to control the flow and content of information to the president, coupled with the weight his advice has been given, put him in a unique position to guide the direction of the Administration's policy toward "enemy combatants" captured on the battlefield or subsequently abducted. With Cheney's aide David Addington as the architect in chief, the administration concluded, under the cover of John Yoo's memoranda from the Justice Department, that any limits on the president's power to order torture — whether law or treaty — could be set aside on the grounds that they were subordinate to the president's constitutional powers as Commander in Chief. On the basis of a superficially plausible theory, generally rejected by expert opinion, that the most effective way to obtain information is to inflict a maximum of pain, the Administration provided the C.I.A. with authorized methods of torture, many of which had hitherto been acknowledged in the United States and elsewhere to constitute war crimes. To the extent these failed to achieve results, the Administration pushed for the infliction of more pain. To the extent its actions were opposed or questioned, the Administration made demonstrably false claims about the effectiveness of its illegal methods in obtaining actionable intelligence. To the extent that military lawyers in the Judge Advocate General's office and other lawyers risked their careers to restore the rule of law, the seasoned bureaucratic infighters in the Vice President's office, particularly Addington, fought back ferociously.

Mayer is no less thorough in describing the hair-raising consequences of the Administration's legal decisions. In constructing their refined programs of systematic cruelty, the C.I.A. and the military drew upon the military's training programs developed to counter Chinese Communist "brainwashing" and the C.I.A.'s massive experiments on the effects of prolonged sensory deprivation during the Vietnam War. Impressed by the ability of the Communist regimes to force false confessions from prisoners at show trials in the 50's, the military had researched Communist torture programs in depth in order to train its soldiers to resist as much as possible through its Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program. In a diabolical twist, the C.I.A. and the military used the lessons of the SERE program to devise an affirmative program of torture designed to extract information from detainees. The fact that torture techniques had proved useful in the past primarily for forcing false confessions does not seem to have given the C.I.A. much pause. Combined with the C.I.A.'s own research into the effectiveness of sensory deprivation in creating total mental breakdown and introducing a schizophrenic state, these techniques were used to inflict a maximum of pain on detainees in the expressed hope of extracting information and (usually unexpressed) hope of exacting revenge. In reading the book, one gets a full sense of the brutal consequences of these techniques in combination, and the savagery with which our government's interrogators redoubled the pain they inflicted when they did not get the results they wanted. To the extent there were any limits on the suffering our intelligence service imposed, those limits were cast aside when the C.I.A. delivered detainees through "extraordinary rendition" to the secret police of Arab dictatorships such as Egypt and Syria.

Jane Mayer's compelling work thus documents not only how vital, and how fragile, is the rule of law, but also reminds us of the terrible consequences that ensue when it breaks down.

Gretchen's Rubin's tour de force on the life and presidency of John F. Kennedy, for which her excellent 40 Ways to Look at Winston Churchill now seems a warm up, presents a many-faceted view of both Kennedy's meteoric political career and his hidden personal life. As Rubin points out, borrowing Isaiah Berlin's famous comparison, if Churchill was a hedgehog guided by one great idea, Kennedy was a fox, whose perspective constantly shifts. While Kennedy may not have lived up to the stature of his hero Churchill (and after all, who could?), Rubin's multifaceted (often directly, deliberately contradictory) forty chapters paint a picture of a man who transcended his personal limitations -- debilitating illness, chronic pain, compulsive womanizing -- to inspire Americans in a way that they have seldom been inspired before and never since. For a flavor of this inspirational quality, one need only revisit some of Kennedy's old speeches -- on youtube or elsewhere -- to get a sense of his enormous power to lift people above themselves. Whatever the unfulfilled promise of the thousand days, Kennedy confronted Soviet aggression, calmed nuclear tensions, kept the peace, created the Peace Corps, and launched the most comprehensive civil rights legislation in a hundred years. In retrospect, even perhaps his greatest lapse, his constant affairs with the best known and most beautiful women in America, has an Olympian quality to it, unmatched by the furtive indiscretions of an Eisenhower or the tawdry sex play of a Clinton with his trailer babes and interns. Kennedy's enduring legacy is a promise that America can be smart but tough, strong but peaceful, cultivated but virile, inspirational but practical, high-minded but unpretentious, principled but tolerant, sophisticated but popular, American but international, prosperous but generous, and competitive but fair. Rubin's aptly chosen epigraph is a quote from Samuel Butler: "He is greatest who is most often in men's good thoughts." To John F. Kennedy, who died two years before I was born, I am grateful for the many good thoughts that he left behind.

Ted Sorensen's inspiring if uneven memoir recounts in vivid detail the excitement of being John F. Kennedy's virtual alter ego from the time Kennedy was a young Senator from Massachusetts to the day he was brutally and unexpectedly gunned down in Dallas. Ever loyal to his fallen leader, Sorensen captures the Kennedys at their very best -- the idealism of the New Frontier, the founding of the Peace Corps, the management of the Cuban Missile Crisis (in which Sorensen played an instrumental part), and the introduction of the most far-reaching Civil Rights legislation in a century. Although not blind to the Kennedys' failings, from the Bay of Pigs to Judith Exnor to Chappaquiddick, Sorensen perhaps understandably prefers to dwell on their soaring aspirations, which Sorensen helped to cast in the most memorable American political rhetoric since Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address.

Not surprisingly, it is hard for the account of Sorensen's life as an international lawyer and political advisor at the law firm of Paul, Weiss to match the heady days of his being the principal advisor to the President of the United States. As Sorensen wryly points out, the only job he ever really wanted was Special Counsel to John F. Kennedy, a job that abruptly ceased to exist in 1963. Nevertheless, Sorensen gamely describes his advice to Robert Kennedy, his correspondence with Jackie Kennedy, his encounters with world leaders ranging from Anwar Sadat to Nelson Mandela, and his failed Senate race and disappointing nomination for head of the C.I.A. under Jimmy Carter.

The book concludes, however, with the intense and moving story of Sorensen's struggle to recover from his stroke and subsequent blindness. All in all, Sorensen comes across as a likable Nebraskan of firm convictions and high principles who, through a combination of luck and ability, was privileged to occupy a pivotal position on the world stage for a brief, shining moment.

Love, death, and memory are perhaps the three central themes of Djebar's wrenching collection of stories The Blood’s Tongue Does Not Run Dry, which was recently translated into English by Tegan Raleigh. When death appears in the text, it always violent, relentlessly stalking the characters as they each try to impose some sense on their surroundings. The Algeria chronicled in this book (that is to say, a country at the height of a fratricidal civil war) seems to resemble Europe during the Black Death. Life appears to go on normally, but in the midst of it all people just suddenly die.

Ah, one might say, but the violence in Algeria was targeted at specific people, and did not affect people randomly, the way a disease might. I did not get this sense from Djebar's stories, however. The French murder the Algerians, the Algerians murder the French, the Algerians murder each other. Murder in these stories is not politicized, although there is a strong implication that, to speak out, for whatever reason, is to court summary execution—trade unionists, teachers, and journalists being among the most prominent victims.

The young teacher Atyka assigns her class a story from The Thousand and One Nights, in which Harun Al Rachid must assign responsibility for the mysterious death of a beautiful young woman found chopped into pieces in a chest. As the number of contributors to her death multiplies, it becomes ever harder to isolate a culprit. Likewise, Djebar's stories have very little to say about culprits, but a great deal to say about the victims of violence. 

Felicie Marie Germaine, French expatriate, is one the few people who dies of natural causes in this book. Comatose in her French hospital bed, she is the subject of her Algerian children's long reveries about life with their father, Mohammed "Moh" Miloudi, “a nobleman when he spoke his mother tongue and a worker from the lowest class when he went over into French.” It turns out that, as a woman of French origins, her throat was nearly cut by an Islamist insurgent whose hand was arrested at the last minute by the tiny gold Koran on a chain that Moh had given her. After three days of detention, she was returned to her traumatized family. After Moh’s death, she departs for Paris with her family. The fact that she survives the war only to die in her Parisian hospital bed is as fortuitous as the abrupt and bloody deaths of other characters in the novel. She returns to Algeria one last time, in a coffin tagged with the name “Yasmina Miloudi,” in order to persuade the authorities to allow a French Catholic to lie by her Algerian husband in a local cemetery. In death, at last, the characters are united in all the ways that life did not allow.

(With thanks to LL).