A smart page-turner about the atypical trial of an al-Qaida member.
The unusual prosecution of an avowed terrorist.
The busy CNN host’s second nonfiction title this year unravels the complexities behind a “unique” criminal case against a jihadist who killed American service members. Tapper’s narrative moves at pace, skillfully blending combat scenes, investigative breakthroughs, and courtroom conflict. In June 2011, Ibrahim S. Harun, a passenger on a ship transporting migrants in the Mediterranean Sea, approached an Italian Green Beret and confessed that he was in al-Qaida and had killed American troops in Afghanistan. Italian authorities took Harun, also known as Spin Ghul, into custody but refused to extradite him if the U.S. planned to try Harun by military commission. To Italian leaders, such proceedings upheld illegal interrogation practices employed by the U.S. Fearful that Harun would be released and participate in another attack, federal prosecutors and FBI agents prepared for a criminal trial in civilian court. Investigators used a military database of items recovered from battle sites to place Harun at the scene of a 2003 ambush of U.S. soldiers, two of whom—Jerod Dennis and Raymond Losano—were killed. A Quran found there bore Harun’s fingerprints. Though Tapper occasionally bogs down in the backgrounds of relatively minor figures, he’s sharp on the political considerations that informed the Justice Department and President Obama’s decision to try Harun in federal court in Brooklyn. Harun was convicted of multiple charges in 2017 and later sentenced to life in prison. Tapper carefully unpacks legal precedents, explaining how “the distinction between terrorism and warfare” became “blurred” after 9/11. This helped enable a prosecution that some believe should have remained in the military’s purview. Remarkably, the judge who sentenced Harun, while not doubting his guilt, tells Tapper that the proceeding “felt like a show trial.”
A smart page-turner about the atypical trial of an al-Qaida member.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781668079447
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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