A valuable contribution to the larger study of terrorism in the United States.
Journalists Gumbel (Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America, 2005, etc.) and Charles investigate the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, uncovering failures in the official investigation and making a strong case for a larger conspiracy that fueled the attack.
In this minutely researched book, the authors take a multifaceted approach. Beginning days before the April 19 attack on the Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, the authors retrace the movements of the two men officially accused of the crime, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, as well as their known associates in radicalized militia communities scattered across the Midwest. Tracing the events of that day, the authors recount the series of miscalculations that led the bombers to switch targets, as well as hypothesize about the larger networks of discontented extremists who had long been threatening a response to the federal government’s bungled handling of the Waco situation. Gumbel and Charles balance their account of the perpetrators with multi-agency accounts from FEMA, the FBI, the ATF and local police and fire departments. By comparing these agency narratives, it becomes clear that many errors in the investigation were the product of miscommunication, territorialism and, in some cases, purposeful misrepresentations on the part of agents. The many voices of responders and investigators add to the voluminous cast of characters featured, from the ranks of extremist militia groups to the stalwart firefighters who treated the first victims. The authors deliver a compelling, articulate narrative history, thorough in both mainstream theories about the bombing and fringe conspiracy theories.
A valuable contribution to the larger study of terrorism in the United States.Pub Date: April 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-198644-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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 Yorkerstaff 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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