Thomas (The Man to See, 1991, etc.), assistant managing editor at Newsweek, depicts a quartet of well-born spies and their role in the CIA's early days. The Office of Strategic Services was a favorite refuge of callow Ivy Leaguers during WW II. After the war these upper-class spooks drifted back to white-shoe law firmsand were bored to tears. In 1948 a klatch gathered to form what eventually became the CIA's Directorate of Plans, its clandestine operations wing. Thomas's four spies are: Frank Wisner, aroused to anticommunism after spying in Romania during the war; Desmond FitzGerald, haunted by the specter of nuclear destruction; Tracy Barnes, who had spied for Allen Dulles in OSS; and Richard Bissell, who as a student at Groton had spent his spare time memorizing train schedules between foreign capitals. More scions than spies, they got together after work at informal, high-spirited Georgetown cocktail parties with a few selected journalists and fellow old boys from the State Department. They were glamorous, invidious, idealistic, and a bit mad. Wisner began to lose his marbles during the Hungarian Revolution; soon thereafter he was hospitalized for manic- depression, and in 1965 he killed himself. When a friend of suave Tracy Barnes opined that Ian Fleming's James Bond thrillers must be exaggerated, Barnes replied, ``On the contrary, they're understated.'' Bissell, known to colleagues as the second most powerful man in Washington when he was head of the Directorate of Plans, took the fall for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Together the four tried to contain the spread of communism by toppling governments in countries like Guatemala and Iran. In the end their ineptitude in the realm of covert operations was equalled only by that of Soviet economic planners. A vivid, arresting work of journalistic history. (First serial to Civilization)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-81025-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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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