A revealing sidebar to a familiar story that has been thoroughly told elsewhere.
The untold story of the CIA's rescue of Solidarity, “Poland’s flowering democratic movement.”
On Dec. 13, 1981, Poland's virtual dictator, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, imposed martial law on his country, suspending and later banning the independent trade union Solidarity. The Ronald Reagan administration responded publicly with vocal condemnation and sanctions directed at the Polish economy. Almost a year later, the president signed a secret presidential finding authorizing the CIA to provide covert nonlethal assistance to moderate Polish opposition groups, including money, printing equipment, videotapes, and telecasts. Between 1983 and the fall of Poland's communist government in 1989, the aid program, code-named QRHELPFUL, delivered publications and materials that kept Solidarity alive at a cost of less than $20 million. To preserve the opposition's legitimacy and independence, the aid was delivered through a web of intermediary organizations, foundations, and individuals so tangled that the Poles themselves did not know the original source. National security consultant Jones (Waging Insurgent Warfare: Lessons from the Vietcong to the Islamic State, 2016, etc.) delivers a comprehensive and insightful account of how Poland moved from communism to democracy through the nonviolent efforts of its independent trade unionists, with assists from Western nations and Pope John Paul II. Along with biographical sketches of Lech Walesa,, Jaruzelski, Reagan, and CIA director William Casey, the author tracks the high-level decisions in the American government to maintain the pressure on Poland and illustrates the Polish government's desperate efforts to navigate between threats of military intervention from Moscow and of domestic upheaval from its own workers and the Catholic Church. Readers hoping for a real-life James Bond adventure will be disappointed, however. The CIA's assistance ultimately plays an important but minor role in the story and includes no tales of personal derring-do, though the details of how materials such as printer's ink were smuggled into Poland are colorful.
A revealing sidebar to a familiar story that has been thoroughly told elsewhere.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-24700-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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