A high-toned effort of appeal to the QAnon crowd.
Ideologically colored account of the rise of the surveillance state.
By former Army officer Siegel’s account, the federal government’s efforts to “eradicate dangerous narratives” speaks to a number of points: Bad information, whether misinformation or disinformation, supposedly lies at the heart of the world’s troubles in the minds of the political elite, and combating it has led to the development of a “parallel system of government” whose purpose it is to control the “information environment.” This parallel system has control as its aim, dictating what can and cannot be said on social media. What can be said, of course, lies on a broad spectrum; one of Siegel’s cases in point is the removal of Trump’s social media accounts following the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Most of his bad guys are Democrats. He holds, for instance, that Barack Obama turned the Democratic Party into a monolithic machine representing the “tenets of progressive technocracy,” using intelligence to “dictate the beliefs held by hundreds of millions of Americans by controlling the media and manipulating public discourse.” Against this backdrop, President Trump is the blameless victim of a “Russiagate hoax” fostered by a hostile press bent on spreading conspiracy theories that “were being used to whip the country into a frenzy of unreason.” Siegel’s villains are many, but high among them is the television host and commentator Rachel Maddow, who “was arguably the most reckless and dogged of all the Russiagate obsessives and covered every new claim in the lurid, paranoid style of a grocery store gossip rag.” Siegel’s narrative becomes ever more fervent as he denounces Joseph Biden, the intelligence community, Black Lives Matter (compared unfavorably to the patriots who stormed the Capitol), vaxxers, and other broad-side-of-the-barn targets.
A high-toned effort of appeal to the QAnon crowd.Pub Date: March 24, 2026
ISBN: 9781250363121
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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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