For nearly the entire War on Terror, Spencer Ackerman has been a national-security correspondent for outlets like The New Republic, WIRED, The Guardian and currently The Daily Beast. He has reported from the frontlines of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. He shared in the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service Journalism for Edward Snowden's NSA leaks to The Guardian, a series of stories that also yielded him other awards, including the Scripps Howard Foundation's 2014 Roy W. Howard Award for Public Service Reporting and the 2013 IRE medal for investigative reporting. Ackerman's WIRED series on Islamophobic counterterrorism training at the FBI won the 2012 online National Magazine Award for reporting. He frequently appears on MSNBC, CNN, and other news networks.
Named a best nonfiction book of 2021 by The Washington Post and
Foreign Policy
"An impressive combination of diligence and verve, deploying
Ackerman’s deep stores of knowledge as a national security
journalist to full effect. The result is a narrative of the last 20
years that is upsetting, discerning and brilliantly argued."
—The New York Times
"Ackerman displays a masterful command of facts."
—The Guardian
"A bracing chronicle of the war on terror and its corrosive effect
on American democracy."
—Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times
“Those who blame former U.S. President Donald Trump for the United
States’ current flirtation with authoritarianism should read
Spencer Ackerman’s Reign of Terror, which looks at the profound
impact the war on terror had on its democratic backsliding.”
—Foreign Policy, "The Best Books We Read in 2021"
“[Reign of Terror] has a percussive drive that makes it a bracing,
infuriating read.”
—The Economist
"In the genre of books that seek to explain why we are in the mess
we are in, Reign of Terror is a formidable entry. To those who want
to portray Trump as wholly exceptional, and discontinuous with the
recent past, the book is an essential corrective."
—The New Republic
"Reign of Terror ranks alongside Adam Serwer’s The Cruelty Is the
Point as one of the most illuminating books to come out of the
Trump era. Ackerman offers a persuasive, exhaustive accounting of a
20-year-old war and its authoritarian consequences."
—New York Magazine
"Reign of Terror is at its strongest when Ackerman recalls some of
the outrages-of-the-week of the past 20 years, which may have faded
from memory but feel portentous in retrospect. . . . The book
compellingly argues that, the protestations of neoconservative
Never Trumpers notwithstanding, Trump’s 'America First' doctrine
was not a break from Bush’s 'freedom agenda'; it was its inevitable
conclusion."
—Slate
"“The first major work to consider the War on Terror in its
entirety, Reign of Terror documents the last 20 years of
state-sponsored violence at a blistering pace, creating a
near-constant cycle of recollection and frustration for the reader.
Ackerman’s real achievement is a commitment to scale, an
expansiveness that encourages readers to see the long view. . .
. Ackerman has sketched a chilling first draft of this part of
American history, and he has done so with an implicit challenge:
how do we make it right?”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
“Even readers who think they already know all there is about the
legacy of 9/11 will find Ackerman’s incisive book an eye-opening
experience.”
—Variety
"Attempting the near impossible . . . Ackerman offers a book
stuffed to the brim with details. . . . A deeper-than-headlines
take. . . . This book does a masterful job communicating how
nothing is as it seems."
—Booklist (starred review)
"Ackerman delivers a tour-de-force about the transformation of the
United States in the two decades since the September 11
attacks, that thoroughly and comprehensively examines how the
post-9/11 security state has engulfed society. . . . An essential
work that encapsulates the trajectory of American politics in the
first two decades of the 21st century, and the lasting impact on
everyday life."
—Library Journal (starred review)
"Ackerman capably connects seemingly disparate elements without
forcing issues so that readers will see how such matters as the
Branch Davidian siege of 1993 helped fuel White supremacist
movements today. . . . An intelligent, persuasive book about
events that are all too current."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Spencer Ackerman’s brilliant, discerning Reign of Terror initiates
the urgent process of truth and reconciliation with the ugly facts
of a 'War on Terror' that condemned a young 21st century
America to the darkness of a surveillance society driven by the
militarization of everyday life and dependent upon surveillance
capitalism for pervasive monitoring and control of people. Ackerman
is at the top of his game, revealing with vivid detail,
investigative force, and unswerving moral clarity how the reign of
terror rained on us, replacing freedom with fear and neighborliness
with suspicion, as it poisoned cherished principles, diminished
rights, and weakened democratic institutions. Every citizen and
lawmaker yearning for a joyful inclusive democratic future must
confront this toxic legacy and its chokehold on our expectations
and our politics. That journey begins here with this courageous,
necessary book."
—Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
and Professor Emeritus, Harvard Business School
"Journalists are said to write the first draft of history and
Spencer Ackerman has been one of the most important reporters in
exposing the horrors, abuses and wars as they unfolded in the
post-9/11 world. In Reign of Terror, Ackerman weaves together his
groundbreaking reporting with a searing analysis of the
consequences of waging borderless, global wars abroad and
assaulting civil liberties at home."
—Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater and Dirty Wars
"America started the war on terrorism twenty years ago. It wound up
at war with itself. Reign of Terror shows how the nation went down
that road to hell. You've never read a book like it."
—Tim Weiner, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning author
of Legacy of Ashes
"Ackerman rivetingly shows how America's response to the 9/11
attacks turned presidents into kings, institutionalized cruelty,
exacerbated racism, and made a continual state of terror the
hallmark of our political culture. Reign of Terror is a profoundly
valuable contribution to the historical record—and, let us hope,
the opening chapter of a long-overdue national reckoning."
—Rick Perlstein, author of Reaganland and Nixonland
"Ackerman's Reign of Terror is breathtaking and essential. By
connecting the threads of American exceptionalism, white supremacy
and the War on Terror, Ackerman's book provides an invaluable lens
to understanding the post-9/11 era, and the United States' violent
embrace of torture, endless war and military occupations,
presidential drone assassination hit-lists, and global mass
surveillance"
—Laura Poitras, Academy Award and Pulitzer-winning filmmaker and
journalist
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