An uneven treatment of an intriguing subject.
A dramatic story about an FBI investigation involving a notorious and brilliant scam artist.
During his tenure at the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover was never big on undercover work, so the agency avoided such operations. However, in the late 1970s, an opportunity arose to take on a significant case and to break new ground by using a hidden wire. Agent Jack Brennan, whose grandfather and father both worked for the FBI, had a “sunny, freewheeling disposition.” His partner, James Wedick Jr., was “pure kinetic energy, a vivacious, speed-talking New Yorker.” Both were smart and ambitious. In 1977, at the Thunderbird Motel outside Minneapolis, they met Phil Kitzer for the first time thanks to an inside source. For 15 years, shrewd, confident Kitzer had been swindling banks, “real estate developers, entrepreneurs and everyday investors out of countless millions of dollars.” How he did it and how he was finally caught by Brennan and Wedick is the subject of journalist Howard’s (Lost Rights: The Misadventures of a Stolen American Relic, 2010) true-crime adventure. The agents had to earn Kitzer’s trust in order for the sting to work. Gradually, they did, and he took them under his wing. Little by little, over the next two years, he involved them in his numerous scams. The agents were able to create a world surrounding Kitzer’s world, and he didn’t see it. Howard follows the agents as they zigzag around the world observing Kitzer in action. Besides being constantly in fear and on edge, they also had to deal with the FBI’s burdensome bureaucracy, skeptical superiors, and battles to get the financing they needed. An elaborate caper-and-sting story like this, filled with deception, chicanery, and subterfuge, should be a page-turning thrill. Unfortunately, Howard’s prose is lackluster and sometimes tepid, resulting in a book that has Ocean’s Eleven written all over it but comes out Dragnet lite.
An uneven treatment of an intriguing subject.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-90742-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2017
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 Yorker staff 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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