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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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