A knowledgeable look at Iraq from a unique perspective.
One of the few senior-level officials who dealt with Saddam Hussein’s government on a regular basis before the U.S.-led invasion relates his experiences as a former weapons inspector and WMD hunter.
Duelfer was deputy head of the United Nations weapons-inspection organization from 1993 to 2000, then head of the CIA-led Iraq Study Group (ISG), which fruitlessly searched for those much-touted weapons of mass destruction. The ISG’s final report on Iraq in 2004 was known as “the Duelfer Report.” Writing of conversations he had with high-level officials, including President George W. Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell and FBI director George Tenet, Duelfer states that he found many in the government reluctant to accept the idea that Iraq lacked existing WMDs. The assumption was that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was fooling the inspectors in some way, hiding the weapons just out of reach. This mistaken assumption would help carry the United States into today’s ongoing conflict with insurgents, one that Duelfer would experience firsthand. In 2004, a convoy of armored vehicles he was riding in was struck by a car bomb, destroying the vehicle behind his and killing two soldiers. Afterward, one of his colleagues grimly surveyed the twisted wreckage and said, “This isn’t worth it.” Duelfer ably sketches the frustrating and difficult history of U.S.-Iraqi relations and his part in them. However, his conclusions—that U.S. officials deeply misjudged Iraqi politics and society before and after the invasion—have already been expressed and written about by others. It’s the author’s on-the-ground experiences that make this book so engaging, and at times chilling. Shortly after the invasion, one Iraqi security official told him bluntly, “You know, to rule Iraq, you will have to become Saddam.” That comment, Duelfer writes, would echo in his mind for a very long time.
A knowledgeable look at Iraq from a unique perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-58648-557-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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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