Useful for students of nuclear policy and intelligence.
Bloodless if thorough account of U.S. efforts to find out what its peers in the nuclear arena have been up to over the last half-century.
George Bush has reason to be unhappy with North Korea, whose foreign ministry branded him “half-baked” and a “philistine,” and with the intelligence community that took so long to find out whether North Korea had The Bomb. It does, at least “a small number of warheads,” avers National Security Archive fellow Richelson (A Century of Spies, 1995, etc.). Two lessons emerge from his narrative. The first is that it is difficult to gather reliable nuclear intelligence; though the CIA and other agencies have many tools and strategies available to them, from spies to high-flying satellites, it is a challenge to chart the activities of nuclear aspirants who understandably don’t want those activities to be known. Thus, while it was our good fortune that the Nazis never quite caught on to the existence of the Manhattan Project, it was also a matter of luck that U.S. agents found European sources willing and able to tell them what the Nazi scientists had developed in their secret labs. It is no surprise, then, that, despite “the almost $30 billion that the United States spent each year on its large array of intelligence agencies, analysts, and collection systems,” a major test by India in 1996 went unnoticed—though not by Pakistan, which nearly went to war over it and which shortly afterward conducted a nuclear test of its own. The second lesson, a corollary to the first, is that much of the interpretation of gathered data has itself been unreliable, as demonstrated by the U.S.’s WMD embarrassment in Iraq. Still, Richelson suggests, there was plenty reason to think that Saddam Hussein’s regime aspired to develop nuclear weapons, even if it was incapable of doing so. Though somewhat clinical and academic, Richelson’s text is certainly full of tense and suspenseful turns.
Useful for students of nuclear policy and intelligence.Pub Date: March 13, 2006
ISBN: 0-393-05383-0
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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 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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