Solid recounting of an important event, and a valuable primer for those wanting to learn how to obtain information from...
Detailed, sometimes dramatic recounting of the planning and implementation of the mission to capture Saddam Hussein, by a soldier who played a leading role.
Army Staff Sgt. Maddox was awarded a Bronze Star for his work devising the methodology used to search for Hussein and interrogate his friends, relatives and bodyguards. His description of these procedures is often so vivid that readers feel they were in the room. While some members of the military used torture to attempt to get information out of Iraqis, Maddox claims he wasn’t one of them. He favored “grinding interrogation,” which sometimes did no good but on other occasions resulted in useful information. His solid narrative reads at times like a detective story, and even though the outcome in this case is known, the twists and turns make for an engaging book. Maddox spent four years assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency doing routine work, with no opportunities to interrogate prisoners, before he finally got his chance to shine in July 2003. He devoted four and a half months to pursuing information about Hussein’s whereabouts, an effort replete with false starts, resistance from violent prisoners and plenty of stonewalling. The description of what Maddox was thinking during his interview with Muhammad Ibrahim Omar Al-Musslit, the subordinate who disclosed Hussein’s whereabouts, strikes a typical note: “I had pushed him into this corner. It was strictly between him and me. Anyone else would have to start all over again. And by then it might be too late.” The prose is evocative but never flowery; experienced ghostwriter Seay (In Justice: Inside the Scandal That Rocked the Bush Administration, 2008, etc.) captures the voice of a soldier with energetic clarity.
Solid recounting of an important event, and a valuable primer for those wanting to learn how to obtain information from reluctant subjects.Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-171447-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
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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