An engaging, well-written, newsworthy study of practical politics and its sometimes unlikely players, and one with plenty of...
So, let’s see. We arm Afghan rebels to fight the Soviets. The Afghans drive the Russians out of their country. We ignore the Afghans. They stew for a few years and hook up with Osama bin Laden. . . .
Crile, a producer for 60 Minutes, doesn’t follow this logical train to the roundhouse, but neither does he portray Texas congressman Charlie Wilson, the man who put rocket launchers into the hands of the future Talibanistas, as a hero (or villain) unalloyed. Indeed, he writes, quoting a CBS cameraman, that “you could turn Charlie Wilson into the biggest hero you’ve ever heard of . . . or the biggest clown.” There’s buffoonery aplenty in Crile’s portrayal of Wilson, a cowboy-boot-clad gent who liked to squire around beauty-contest winners and drop wads of cash on the gaming tables of Las Vegas. But Wilson found his life-or-death, utterly serious cause in the Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion of 1979, which gave him the opportunity to stick it to the hated Russians and build a power base for himself on Capitol Hill. Not that he had to fight terribly hard to enlist support in Congress: when Wilson first raised the prospect of giving a mere $40 million to the Mujahideen rebels, “$17 million of that specifically earmarked for getting them a better anti-aircraft gun than they presently have,” he was amazed to find that no one objected. Working with a shadowy Greek CIA operative and a handful of true believers in the anti-Soviet cause (one of whom, Cline writes, had trained to parachute into Russia with a “small tactical weapon strapped to his leg”), Wilson got those weapons into Afghanistan—and after them, plenty more, and all without the publicity or controversy that attended other arms deals of the Reagan era.
An engaging, well-written, newsworthy study of practical politics and its sometimes unlikely players, and one with plenty of implications.Pub Date: May 27, 2003
ISBN: 0-87113-854-9
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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
