News of the sort usually reported in The Wall Street Journal or on 60 Minutes gains a human dimension in Scammell’s morality...
Forget the lawyer jokes. Here admirable attorneys and their determined clients use a peculiar law to wallop some haughty perps who almost lifted billions from Uncle Sam’s pockets.
Veteran nonfiction author Scammell (Mortal Remains, 1991, etc.) opens with a graphic war story verifying the bona fides of his first hero, a Vietnam vet who reported on faulty relays, many used in weaponry, knowingly provided by a Teledyne unit. His case was taken by a young public-interest firm, Phillips & Cohen, which in 1986 had been instrumental—with the legislative support of Senator Charles Grassley and Congressman Howard Berman—in reviving the False Claims Act, originally passed under Abraham Lincoln. Scammell explains with clarity the salient features of this legislation founded on the common-law notion of qui tam, under which an informer may sue for civil damages on behalf of the government (which can bring criminal charges) and thus earn a share of any award. Few firms take on qui tam litigation, which generally involves a complex, uphill legal battle, but Phillips & Cohen frequently did. The author describes their clients and their suits against thieving defense contractors and Wall Street sharpies, focusing on the Medicare fraud disclosures that resulted in a $1.7-billion payout by hospital owners and administrators. Scammell imparts a novelistic flavor to his depictions of informants’ lives of strain and isolation, sometimes compounded by death threats. Readers won’t be surprised to learn that working for—or being fired by—a willful, malevolent employer can be hell, even when redressed with multimillion-dollar qui tam rewards. Grassley and Berman lend their imprimatur to the text, which also appends a gratuitous reprinting of the False Claims Act.
News of the sort usually reported in The Wall Street Journal or on 60 Minutes gains a human dimension in Scammell’s morality tale starring two American archetypes: the team player and the lone whistleblower of personal integrity.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-87113-909-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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