A victim's damning, if querulously overstated, case against the Office of Independent Counsel (OIC), which, in its pursuit of Iran-contra malefactors, seems to be as concerned with scalps as with justice. Brimming with resentment, Abrams offers a one-sided first- person version of his bruising encounter with the OIC. Appointed Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs in 1985, Abrams became heir to a number of ongoing initiatives, one of which involved toppling Nicaragua's Sandinistas. He left office with the Reagan Administration and heard nothing from Lawrence Walsh (head of the OIC) or his subordinates until the summer of 1991, a few months before the statute of limitations would have precluded any indictments. In the meantime, the convictions of high-profile principals like Oliver North had been reversed on appeal, and, Abrams argues, the heat was on the OIC to justify its existence. Special prosecutors eventually apprised the author that they could charge him with a welter of felonies. Caught on some inconsistencies in his testimony to Congress and faced with the prospect of a seven-figure legal-defense bill, Abrams decided to plead guilty to a couple of misdemeanors that amounted to withholding information from lawmakers (e.g., on a $10-million contribution from the Sultan of Brunei that never reached the contras). In recounting his ordeal, Abrams makes some valid points- -notably on the OIC's lack of accountability, its predilection for encouraging lower-echelon targets to rat out their superiors, and its Kafkaesque capacity to criminalize policy/political differences between the executive and legislative branches of government—but he does so with an air of injured, ``why-me?'' innocence that promises to irritate his supporters and to confirm the suspicions of partisan adversaries. While there's no question that Abrams suffered much at the heavy hands of the OIC, his cause is not well served with vintage whine.
Pub Date: Nov. 16, 1992
ISBN: 0-02-900167-6
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1992
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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