It’s too bad Harris didn’t take the trouble to document his sources, because if everything he says can be supported, he’s...
A rollicking but slippery rendition of the prosecution of the pockmarked potentate of Panama.
Harris (The Last Stand, 1996), who began his career as an antiwar activist, now produces investigative journalism of the big screen, good-guys-vs.-bad-guys variety. Here the bad guys are Manuel Noriega, the Medellín cocaine cartel, and especially the members of the Reagan and Bush administrations who came into contact with them. The good guys are a couple of underdog DEA agents and federal prosecutors in Miami who busted through the old boys’ network to investigate and indict Noriega—an indictment that, ironically, led to an invasion of Panama championed by many of the general’s former protectors. The story is told colorfully, with lots of tough-guy cop-talk, scummy informers, and brief cutaways to beleaguered wives. It’s unquestionably readable, even if the outcome is too well-known to generate much suspense. There are even a few moments (such as the anecdote an informer relates to DEA agent Steve Grilli about Noriega’s escapades in an airplane cockpit) that rise to the level of classic tragicomedy. But Harris’s storytelling inspires no more trust than Hollywood’s. He provides no notes or attributions, even for direct quotes. He misrepresents legal issues integral to the case, for example confusing jurisdiction and venue. He coyly avoids names, even of obvious public figures, perhaps for legal reasons. And his tone is so stridently anti–Cold War and anti-Reagan that it’s hard to give his sloppy techniques the benefit of the doubt.
It’s too bad Harris didn’t take the trouble to document his sources, because if everything he says can be supported, he’s written an accessible, eye-opening account of one of the murkiest episodes in recent history. But it’s hard to take him seriously on his own merits.Pub Date: May 21, 2001
ISBN: 0-316-34080-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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
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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