A competent enough account of battle, punctuated by useful lists of what to take along. (Power Bars are good. So are...
Of mullahs, mujaheddin and moolah: a spook’s-eye view of the recent fighting in Afghanistan.
Most professional soldiers are reluctant to talk about the things they’ve done and seen in the field, but CIA types these days seem happy to tell all. Agent Schroen takes pains to accentuate the positive—opening, for instance, with the happy assurance that a CIA review board called his book “the most detailed account of a CIA field operation told by an officer directly involved that has ever been cleared . . . for publication.” Among the details to which we’re treated: Schroen’s team’s communications officer was flatulent, but he kept the cables coming, and that’s the important thing. If you’re high enough up in the paramilitary food chain, you get what you ask for, including, in the case of the “Jawbreaker” crew, 200 pounds of Starbucks coffee and a Bible (“I never knew whether Chris actually read the Bible he had requested, but it was a thoughtful gesture for the CTC logistics officers to make the extra effort to purchase and ship it to him”). If you want to get things done in Afghanistan, you pay bribes: $50,000 a month for senior commanders back in the golden days of anti-Soviet intervention, rather more today (“In the forty days I was in the Panjshir Valley, I spent $5 million, the vast majority passed to our Afghan allies for their use”). And, by Schroen’s account, there’s nothing quite so thrilling to behold as a cavalry charge, even when the bad guys have machine guns. After all, the good guys have bunker-buster missiles, and it’s not so bad to behold flaming Taliban and al-Qaida troops breathing their last, either. And so on.
A competent enough account of battle, punctuated by useful lists of what to take along. (Power Bars are good. So are knives.) Schroen never quite gets around to explaining why Osama & Co. are still on the loose, but he does close by wondering whether, “given the total preoccupation with Iraq,” the Bush folks will forget about Afghanistan—and perhaps their quarry, too.Pub Date: May 31, 2005
ISBN: 0-89141-872-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Presidio/Random
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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