The two titles sucking up media attention this week are reviewed in quick succession by Michiko Kakutani in the NYT.

Yesterday, she reviewed former Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner’s Stress Test:  Reflections on Financial Crises (RH/Crown), saying it “provides an intimate take on the financial crisis, and in this respect stands as a gripping, if subjective bookend to already published accounts, like journalist David Wessel’s riveting chronicle In Fed We Trust [RH/Crown, 2009) and the economist Alan S. Blinder’s lucid After the Music Stopped, [Penguin Press, 2013]” But, she says it does not provide new revelations.The Daily Beast, however, manages to unearth 13 juicy bits (that is, if you consider Geithner’s daughter’s not knowing the acronymn “POTUS,” juicy).

Today, Kakutani turn her attention to the other hot media title, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State, by Glenn Greenwald (Macmillan/Metropolitan). Again, she finds much of the material familiar, from news stories last year (many of them by Greenwald himself, who won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking the story at The Guardian), as well as from an earlier book The Snowden Files (RH/Vingate, Feb, 2014), but says Greenwald’s book is “enlivened by reproductions of dozens of fascinating documents from the Snowden archive that help illustrate the N.S.A.’s methodology” and she applauds his “fierce argument in defense of the right of privacy,”

Both books are rising on Amazon’s sales rankings (Geithner’s is at #8, while Greenwald’s is at #13). Holds in libraries, however, are relatively light at this point.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2014 at 10:06 am and is filed under 2014 -- Summer, Nonfiction, Politics and Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.