A lucid chronology of error, worthy of shelving alongside the best of the Iraq books to date.
As Keith Olbermann reminds us every weeknight, it’s been some 1,750 days and counting since George Bush crowed, “Mission accomplished!” Editor & Publisher editor Mitchell further rubs Bush’s nose in it, and commemorates other erroneous nabobs as well.
This book gathers some five years’ worth of Mitchell’s media-watchdog opinion pieces from that august journal, consistent in their opposition to the Iraq misadventure and prescient in their having assumed from the first that Bush would indeed invade: “…as early as October 7, 2002, Editor & Publisher…was opening one story with ‘As the United States prepares to invade Iraq…” Mitchell was one of the first to question New York Times reporter Judith Miller’s coziness with the administration and its claims through her of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s bunkers. He was also quick to criticize MSNBC news host Chris Matthews’s assertion, on that very day of Bush’s mission-accomplished declaration, “He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics.” Matthews, one hopes, is reminded of that statement daily, and one hopes that the New York Times reporters who assured readers that the troops were coming home in May 2003 are reminded of their wrong call as well. The problem is one of complacency and complicity. Mitchell quotes Washington Post correspondent and Colin Powell biographer Karen DeYoung as having observed, quite rightly, “We are inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power.” True, Mitchell suggests, but that’s not the way it’s supposed to be. Visiting such points on the timeline as the Pat Tillman death-by-friendly-fire coverup, the Miller affair (and her subsequent buyout) and the suicides of several American soldiers in protest against corruption, Mitchell charts how disastrously wrongheaded the war has been from the start, and how numerous and various the wrongheaded have been.
A lucid chronology of error, worthy of shelving alongside the best of the Iraq books to date.Pub Date: March 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4027-5657-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Union Square & Co.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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 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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