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SECRECY

THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

The senior US senator from New York analyzes the roots of America’s obsession with government secrecy and convincingly pleads for its dismantling. A stint as chairman of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy provided Moynihan (Miles to Go, 1996; Pandaemonium, 1993; etc.) with a unique vantage point from which to survey our byzantine and bizarre national security apparatus. Moynihan traces much of the impetus for secrecy back to 1917, when the Espionage Act, passed amid revelations about German intelligence efforts in the US, sought to prevent the unlawful obtaining of defense information by foreign governments. As counterproductive as German spying was, so was the response. of the ostensibly liberal Woodrow Wilson, who threatened the civil liberties of German-Americans. The need to protect secrets in WWII resulted in a repeat of this hysteria about loyalty and conspiracy (this time, regarding Japanese-Americans). As noted by historian Richard Gid Powers in his trenchant introduction, Moynihan’s most formidable insight (borrowed from Max Weber) is that secrecy is a form of regulation in which bureaucrats hoard secrets like assets. Moynihan’s commission learned, for instance, that the US army decoded secret Soviet cables corroborating espionage charges against Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, yet never revealed their existence, even to President Truman. New security organizations such as the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency “prevented [the] American government from accurately assessing the enemy and then dealing rationally with them during this and other critical periods.” The costs of this, Moynihan argues persuasively, have been steep: liberal-conservative strife over the existence of Soviet espionage; attacks on civil liberties; presidents entangled in scandal (Watergate doomed Nixon, and Iran-contra almost did the same to Reagan); and ruinous arms-race spending against a rival whose decline the CIA never managed to predict. An intelligent, ironic postmortem on a system that is not only outdated but was flawed from the start. (8 b&w photos, not seen)

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-300-07756-4

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Yale Univ.

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1998

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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