In a Len Deighton novel come to life, Whitney (senior European correspondent for The New York Times) tells the engrossing story of the trade in human lives conducted by cold war adversaries in a divided Berlin. After the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, many tried to escape; of these, many were killed but most were captured—often calling upon the services of East German lawyer Wolfgang Vogel, who quickly became known for winning prisoners their freedom from East German jails, as well as from the country. Beginning with the Rudolf Abel/Francis Gary Powers exchange and peaking with the release of Anatoly Shcharansky, Vogel, working closely with his ``employer,'' the dreaded Stasi, negotiated the release of tens of thousands of political prisoners—but at a price. The Federal Republic of Germany paid out billions of marks over almost three decades, trading spies at border crossings in the dead of night. For his services, Vogel earned hundreds of thousands of marks and gained the respect of Western governments. But, Whitney shows, the lawyer had made a Faustian deal. While saving many East Germans from prison, he also helped bring about the downfall of his government masters, undermining his own future—for each release symbolically chipped away a bit of the Wall, and, in time, the pressure of would-be emigrants overwhelmed the East German government, bringing down Communist Party leader Erich Honecker and then the Wall itself. Some of the credit seems due to Vogel, who negotiated as hard with the Stasi for more releases as he did with the West for more money. Drawing on a great number of interviews, some with Vogel himself, Whitney offers a fascinating new perspective from which to view the rubble of East Germany and the secretive world of cold war spies. (Eight pages of b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8129-2221-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
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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