Although the crew behaved reasonably well under terrible conditions, this is a story where dimwits and villains dominate,...
Readers who assume that North Korea’s reputation as an international nut case is a recent development must read this painful account of its 1968 seizure of the USS Pueblo and abuse of its crew.
Former Los Angeles Times political reporter Cheevers has done meticulous research, including tracking down survivors of this half-forgotten outrage that made headlines at the time. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union stationed eavesdropping ships in international waters off each other’s coasts. Both observed a gentleman’s agreement to keep hands off, a sensible policy since a nation who attacked an enemy spy ship could expect retaliation on one of its own. Ignoring the fact North Korea had no spy ships was the first of many American blunders. As a vessel, the Pueblo was slow, feebly armed, and crammed with secret machines, manuals and documents. Suddenly attacked by multiple North Korean ships, the crew’s frantic efforts destroyed only a fraction of this material, resulting in an intelligence bonanza for the captors. Then, the North Koreans tortured and brutally beat the prisoners. They were starved, refused medical care, forced to sign bizarre confessions, filmed and paraded in public. Emaciated and sick, the men returned after a year of maddening negotiations. They were acclaimed national heroes: a godsend that prevented the Navy from court martialing the captain and his staff for surrendering. “As we unleash spies and covert operations against a growing list of twenty-first-century adversaries,” writes Cheevers, “we’d do well to remember the painful lessons of the Pueblo.
Although the crew behaved reasonably well under terrible conditions, this is a story where dimwits and villains dominate, and Cheevers does a fine job of rescuing from obscurity a painful Cold War debacle.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-451-46619-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: NAL Caliber/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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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