Colorfully reported, not so carefully reasoned.
A British journalist’s tales of world-wide misery caused by America’s blundering response to 9/11.
According to Streatfeild (Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control, 2007, etc.), when the shock and confusion of 9/11 subsided, cynical American leaders seized an opportunity to rearrange the world more to their liking. Relying on erroneous assumptions and their own good intentions, abandoning democratic ideals and the rule of law, America and her allies crafted crude certainties and substituted them for the truth. The author features eight stories designed to show how they made the world decidedly less safe. He begins his parade of disasters with an account of the redneck loser in Texas, who, thinking himself an avenging patriot, shot and killed an immigrant Indian gas station attendant. More horrors followed. To help ensure its own reelection, the Australian government adopted an outrageous lie to demonize a boatload of refugees as terrorists. Believing they were striking Taliban forces, U.S. helicopter gunships strafed a wedding celebration in Afghanistan, killing 48 civilians. With too few soldiers to secure Iraq, the U.S. forces exposed the largest explosives plant in the Middle East to looting. Misidentifying an Egyptian traveler as a member of al-Qaeda, Macedonian border guards arrested the man and permitted the CIA to snatch him; he was subjected to months of incarceration and harsh interrogation before the agency acknowledged the mistake. America also overlooked Uzbekistan’s appalling human-rights record in return for access to a vital air base from which to launch strikes on Afghanistan. In Pakistan, the global polio-eradication campaign, tantalizingly close to solution, collapsed because of distrust for and rage against America. A tenacious reporter, Streatfeild packs the narrative with telling detail, instructive interviews and dramatic events, but he reaches conclusions too sweeping. Surely, for example, incidents of good-ol’-boy racism or Muslim paranoia cannot be wholly ascribed to the War on Terror, no matter how clumsily waged.
Colorfully reported, not so carefully reasoned.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-60819-270-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
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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