A few exotic adventures, some tense moments, lots of redundant reflections.
Triumphs and tragedies in the career of a former FBI agent who became one of the Bureau’s first hostage-negotiation specialists.
The author, who retired in 1995 after 25 years’ service, ruminates on personal wins and losses as well as the evolution of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s policies and tactics as it moved into the era of terrorist threats under two different chiefs, J. Edgar Hoover and Louis Freeh. The initial chapters, covering Van Zandt’s struggles as a college dropout trying to fulfill his lifelong ambition of becoming a federal agent, are less than riveting. And it may come as a disappointment to the reader that he decides to “leave to history” the disastrous 1993 confrontation with the Branch Davidians near Waco, Texas, without expanding on his personal involvement in it. He does, however, include part of the transcript of his many conversations with cult leader David Koresh and appears at one point to suggest that, had his team been allowed more time, the burning of the compound, which resulted in the deaths of women and children as well as Koresh, might have been avoided. He also suggests, quite brusquely, that because of his own Christian beliefs, the FBI was concerned that he might develop empathy with the Davidians. In summation, though, he backs away from direct claims. He does cover his participation, as a security consultant, in tracking down Theodore Kaczynski by comparing personal letters supplied by an attorney for Kaczynki’s brother with a “manifesto” sent to newspapers by the so-called Unabomber. Another Van Zandt coup: suggesting to his former FBI associates that it was “a white male probably hung up on Waco” and not international terrorists (the FBI’s initial target) behind the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Timothy McVeigh was later executed for it.
A few exotic adventures, some tense moments, lots of redundant reflections.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-399-15308-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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