Vivid pages soaked with blood, reverberating with cries of pain, loss, and regret.
A former U.S. State Department official who spent seven consecutive war years in Iraq and Afghanistan debuts with a damning memoir about our lies, failures, and horrors in the region.
Weston’s title refers to the moment when people with severe facial injuries first look at themselves in the mirror. He believes the rest of us need to take a look, as well. This is no story told by someone residing safely in academia or in a Washington, D.C., office. The author, who worked for both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, was assigned to the Marines for much of his duty, and he had extensive experience with gunfire, explosive devices, and terrible accidents. On one occasion—an event that haunts him throughout this deeply disturbing text—his actions led, indirectly, to the deaths of 31 service members, whose helicopter crashed on the way to secure polling locations for the 2005 Iraqi elections—a mission the author had urged. Weston revisits this moment continually, his guilt emerging in painful, self-recriminating sentences. Later, back in the United States, he endeavored to visit all of their graves and to meet some family members. The author spares no one. Bush and Cheney, he says, lied—even joked—about weapons of mass destruction; politicians from both major parties supported the troops in rhetorical but not meaningful ways. In several places, Weston provides lists of fallen warriors, and readers will be struck by the youth of those killed in action: many were teenagers, most others in their 20s. And for what? he asks repeatedly. The author declares that on both fronts—Iraq and Afghanistan—we failed to accomplish much that’s meaningful, and in Iraq, we sowed the seeds of al-Qaida, the Islamic State group, and a most horrific civil war. Weston also focuses sharply on the wounded and disfigured and on the local people, who have suffered unspeakably.
Vivid pages soaked with blood, reverberating with cries of pain, loss, and regret.Pub Date: May 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-35112-6
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016
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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