Insights about failed diplomacy in the Middle East by an American agent with a unique perspective.
After earning a law degree and a doctorate, the late O’Connell (1921–2010) joined the CIA and was stationed in Jordan in 1958, where he won the trust of King Hussein, a significant U.S. ally in the volatile Middle East. After leaving the CIA in the early ’70s, the author joined his brother's law firm and became Hussein's Washington representative. The two men dealt with each other, in public and private, thousands of times. O'Connell came to see Hussein as the most likely broker of accord between the Jewish state of Israel and its Arab antagonists. But frequently his comrades at the CIA, as well as other U.S. government officials, seemed blinded to Hussein's potential as a peace broker because of political allegiances to Israel. Throughout the narrative, the author portrays many prominent American political figures as fools or liars, or both—including Henry Kissinger, Lyndon Johnson, Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush. The memoir is bound to cause controversy within Israel and among Israeli supporters around the globe, given the author's rage at what he believes is a murderous state whose most influential leaders prefer war to peace. Despite the foibles of the CIA, O'Connell demonstrates little ill will, remaining a loyal alumnus. A readable, potentially incendiary account that assumes a certain amount of prior knowledge about Middle East diplomacy, yet is coherent enough for novice readers to follow.
Pub Date: May 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-393-06334-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
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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