No two sentences more clearly and disturbingly summarize what Tom Engelhardt's Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World is about: a Leviathan national-security state rampaging around the world in pursuit of perfect security and creating chaos wherever it puts its grotesque girth down.

The editor of TomDispatch.com, which he launched in November 2001, Engelhardt has spent the last 13 years trying to understand our post–9/11 world, where al-Qaeda's atrocities in lower Manhattan, Northern Virginia, and a field in Pennsylvania led the United States to shed any pretense of being a democracy and embrace its imperial ambitions without reservation. (Full disclosure: I'm a regular contributor to TomDispatch.com.) The book itself is a collection of TomDispatch pieces originally published between 2011 and 2014, modestly revised and updated, and woven into book form. Whether it's torture, kidnapping, weaponized drones strikes, special forces' raids, or the rise of the surveillance state, Engelhardt has been there to document the corruption and savage violence that has seeped into our nation's policymakers and warriors, who obey no restrictions — whether legal or moral — to their ambitions of total global domination.