A dispassionate reference work on modern intelligence gathering. Rather than a romantic or riveting story about espionage, Richelson (American Espionage and the Soviet Target, 1987), a senior fellow at the National Security Archive, offers an extended encyclopedia entry detailing the progressively more complex methods countries have devised to steal and conceal their secrets from each other. He traces the development of the 20th century's major spy services, describes many of their important players, chronicles key events in the modern history of espionage, and evaluates governments' use and misuse of intelligence gathering. At times, the book is fascinating almost in spite of itself, as when Richelson describes Stalin's scorn for predictions of the 1941 Nazi attack on the Soviet Union. Mostly, however, his technique of presenting the facts with virtually no commentary or color is stupefying to the layperson. It also seems excessively myopic: For example, the author doesn't tell us whether there was any debate over the morality or legality of America's 1945 recruitment of Nazi spy Reinhard Gehlen, eventual head of West Germany's intelligence service, and he discusses only the narrowest part of the 1986 debate about giving Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to anti-Soviet rebels in Afghanistan, describing the CIA's concern that the missiles could be traced to the US but ignoring the broader argument over whether Islamic fundamentalists should be trusted with such lethal weapons at all. Other serious omissions include the lack of a chapter on the CIA's secret wars in Central America during the 1980s and the absence of a discussion of the CIA's failure to anticipate the collapse of the Soviet Union. Of value to researchers but little interest to a general readership.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-19-507391-6
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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