RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books...an essential book on a small but key part of the prehistory of this hijacking of culture ... Whitney’s writing burns with indignation at the fact that few cultural figures who worked with the CIA ever faced accountability for their actions ... Perhaps the strangest and most compelling of Whitney’s revelations are how the founding managing editor of The Paris Review, John Train, worked with the CIA-backed mujahideen in Afghanistan, during the 1980s, to finance a film on the war and against the Soviet presence ... Finks is a fine historical book, reviewing propaganda’s long and tortuous history in the world of art. With huge contemporary relevance, Whitney recalls what many look back on as a far more innocent media age, before the internet, and yet the effects of government-backed lies were just as deadly then as now.
