The prose is workmanlike, but Rossmiller’s patriotic, risky involvement in righting the wrongs of 9/11 resonates on every...
A crusading, modern-day vigilante goes online to flesh out unsuspecting terrorists.
Born on a ranch in bucolic Conrad, Mont., to a wheat farmer and a schoolteacher, Rossmiller blossomed from a plucky, determined “Little Scrapper” to a young woman fascinated with current events, news and history, relating more to her father’s brooding interest in the psychology of serial killers rather than her mother’s feminine pursuits. After college, she returned to Montana, married childhood friend Randy and began paralegal work, which led to her appointment, at 29, as the youngest female municipal judge in American history, trying mostly drug-offense cases. In 2002, still incensed by the atrocities of 9/11, Rossmiller became desperate for “a way to channel my outrage” and launched a personal War on Terror campaign. She learned Arabic, studied the Koran, educated herself on Middle Eastern geographies and interacted within the same Internet forums and chat rooms that had become communication portals for the stealth terrorists responsible for 9/11. From there, her story speeds off in a dizzying array of events as a result of Rossmiller’s creation of 40 false Muslim-radical identities and the tracking of jihadist activity with a spreadsheet. Additionally, the author furtively became an FBI-reporting cyber-sleuth and organized the Seven Seas Global Intelligence Group. She would eventually feel the heat of retribution, betrayal and life-threatening peril alongside the satisfaction of executing successful sting operations busting traitorous National Guardsman Ryan G. Anderson and Alaska pipeline terrorist Michael Reynolds. The author’s somewhat stiffly written, steely narrative darkens further once the author reconciles the toll her valiant, fearless career in cyber counterintelligence and the many media-scrutinized court testimonies had taken on her well-being and her family’s safety, spurring health woes and the collapse of her marriage.
The prose is workmanlike, but Rossmiller’s patriotic, risky involvement in righting the wrongs of 9/11 resonates on every page.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-230-10255-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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