To coincide with the 20th anniversary of President Nixon's resignation, Emery (consultant for a Discovery Channel tie-in and former London Times executive editor) provides some new details in engagingly retelling the ``compelling story of botched government.'' It may seem that the Watergate scandal should be well- documented by now, but many of the facts are still unclear, and the accounts of the principals often conflict. Thus, Emery tells a sometimes confusing Rashomon-like narrative, referring first to one memoir, then to another sharply differing one in recounting the major events: the Nixon administration's long-standing program of covert operations against real and perceived ideological adversaries; the bungled May 28, 1972, break-in by Republican operatives at the Democratic national headquarters in the Watergate complex; and the increasingly desperate cover-up by the Nixon campaign and by Nixon himself. But although Emery unearths some new tapes and discusses some new details (his major revelation is that John Mitchell attempted to enter into a plea bargain in which Nixon would be spared prosecution in return for Mitchell's guilty plea), his account clearly reestablishes what other Watergate accounts have demonstrated: that high-level officials in the White House were parties to the Watergate break-in and other secret and unlawful operations, and that Nixon himself was an early party to the administration's and the campaign's frantic (and for a time effective) obstructions of justice. Emery argues persuasively that Nixon's resignation, in the face of almost certain impeachment, resulted from a bipartisan recognition that his administration was guilty of uniquely enormous political crimes (Nixon would never have been in danger of being impeached without Republican defections on the House Judiciary Committee). A first-rate and clear exposition of a complex and bizarre episode that traumatized America and tested the vitality of its political system. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (First printing of 35,000; authour tour)
Pub Date: July 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8129-2383-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
