Absorbing throughout, and meaty stuff for intelligence and aviation buffs.
New York Times editorial-page editor and Polk Award–winner Taubman delivers an expertly related, accessible account of a turning point in American intelligence, when on-the-ground spying gave way to a belief that technology could cure all ills.
Having been caught unawares at the Battle of the Bulge by a lack of reliable information about German troop movements, Dwight Eisenhower had long been determined to improve American capabilities. The death of Josef Stalin in 1953, however, saw the US again caught off guard; as Eisenhower complained, “Ever since 1946, I know that all the so-called experts have been yapping about what would happen when Stalin dies and what we, as a nation, should do about it. Well, he’s dead. And you can turn the files of our government inside out—in vain—looking for any plans laid. We have no plan.” Demanding better and timelier information about Soviet military capabilities and deployments, Eisenhower authorized the development of two innovations: high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft such as the U2 and SR-71, which enabled “timeliness, geographical coverage, accepted accuracy”; and supposedly secret satellites that could photograph every inch of the Soviet empire. Those goals were met, but only after severe technical obstacles were overcome by throwing millions and billions of dollars at them. The results were both good and bad, Taubman writes. Eisenhower and his successors had the benefit of better information about such things as missile silos and moving tank columns, but in the end they would also have to contend with “distortions in the nation’s intelligence agencies, including an overreliance on dazzling machines and a shortage of resources in more traditional fields like the recruitment and training of spies”—a shortcoming recently and keenly underscored by the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Absorbing throughout, and meaty stuff for intelligence and aviation buffs.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-684-85699-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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.
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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