Things That Can and Cannot Be Said is a slim, complicated volume. On its surface, the essay collection offers an account of Edward Snowden's 2014 meeting with John Cusack (star of High Fidelity and board member of the Freedom of Press Foundation), Arundhati Roy (author of The God of Small Things) and Daniel Ellsberg (who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971). Things That Can and Cannot Be Said is less about Snowden's 2013 decision to leak classified NSA data than it is about the context of that decision, offering a statement on the surveillance state as it relates to war and peace in the 21st century.
"Through our conversations," writes Cusack, "I became very aware that what gets lost, or goes unsaid, in most of the debates around surveillance and whistleblowing is a perspective and context from outside the United States and Europe." Cusack's essays set up the need for this context, and Roy provides it with her reflections on her experiences living in India and traveling around the world. The collection bounces back and forth between the works of both writers as it builds to its crescendo: a transcript from their 2014 meeting with Snowden and Ellsberg. "It definitely cannot not be written about... because the world is a millipede that inches forward on millions of real conversations." Things That Can and Cannot Be Said is an unapologetically radical account of several such real conversations aiming to do just that: inch the world forward. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm