by James G. Blight & Bruce Allyn & David A. Welch ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 15, 1993
Verbatim proceedings from a blockbuster Havana-based 1992 conference on the Cuban missile crisis of 1963, plus interpretive commentary by a team of down-to-earth scholars led by Brown University's Blight and also including Allyn (Harvard Law School) and Welch (University of Toronto; coauthor with Blight of On the Brink, 1989). The conference—fifth in a series that began in 1987—featured an all-star cast (including, for the first time, representatives from the erstwhile USSR) who played leading roles in the dramatic Kennedy/Khrushchev confrontation that brought the world far closer to nuclear holocaust than had previously been imagined. Among those on hand were Fidel Castro; Ray Cline (sometime supervisor of the CIA's photographic intelligence center); General Anatoly Gribkov (operational director of the USSR's 1962 placement of IRBMs in Cuba); Robert McNamara; Arthur Schlesinger; and Oleg Troyanovsky (a US-educated diplomat who counseled the Politburo on American intentions). With high-caliber participants freely speaking their minds, the four-day symposium generated both heat and light that cut through the fog of a virtual conflict. It turns out that the Kremlin's decision to deploy missiles in Cuba owed at least as much to a desire to defend the island nation against the possibility of US aggression as to the goal of redressing a perceived imbalance in the hemispheric placement of strategic weapons. Also new is the disclosure that, when Kennedy intervened, atomic warheads already had been delivered and were ready for installation. The annotated transcripts of the gathering's electric colloquies give readers a ringside seat at a consequential debate, while Blight and his fellow academics offer thoughtful analyses of the geopolitical predicaments in which Castro was entangled then—as well as now, with his onetime superpower ally having effectively ceased to exist. Oral history of a high and enlightening order.
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-42149-1
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1993
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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