Lacks drama, intrigue and insight.
How a landmark Supreme Court ruling that established the state secrets privilege was challenged 50 years later.
In 1948, an Air Force test flight crashed into the swamps of Florida, killing three civilian contractors on board. Consequently, their families sued the government to determine what went wrong. Citing executive privilege and national security, the Air Force refused to divulge any information and was eventually vindicated by the Supreme Court in its 1953 ruling, U.S. v. Reynolds. In 2003, a widow and three children of the dead contractors petitioned to have the ruling overturned, claiming the Air Force had lied to cover up negligence. Giving the increasing importance of Reynolds (the Bush administration cites it constantly), this should be a fascinating story. Regrettably, Pulitzer-winner Siegel (Lines of Defense, 2002, etc.) clutters it with irrelevant detail, such as where minor figures in the drama went to college and what they studied. He also fails to bring to life the major players, who read like stock characters in an intergenerational TV drama. Reynolds had a dramatic impact on American policy during the past 50 years, Siegel rightly points out; it’s frequently cited by government officials seeking to keep their doings hidden from prying journalists and aggrieved plaintiffs—or, if you buy the government’s version, evil terrorists. The author loses these complexities amid the minutiae of the case as it wound it way through the courts, from ’48 to ’53 and ’03 to ’07, when the Supreme Court again ruled against the contractors’ families. That decision suggests how greatly the first Reynolds decision has shaped current government policy and behavior, as well as judicial oversight of it, but Siegel never lifts his eyes from the details long enough to provide the in-depth analysis this important case demands.
Lacks drama, intrigue and insight.Pub Date: June 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-077702-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
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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