Anyone with an interest in the geopolitics of the global war on terrorism will find value in this account.
A former hostage of the Taliban continues the story begun with Captive (2010), digging deeper into the circumstances of his kidnapping.
Van Dyk, a longtime student of Afghan history who had reported on the war against the Soviet invaders 35-plus years ago, returned in 2008 to report on the Taliban and their links with al-Qaida. He was taken captive in the mountainous country beyond the border with Pakistan and threatened with death unless certain prisoners at Guantánamo were freed or, failing that, the delivery of a large cash ransom. None of these things materialized, it seems, but he was freed. In this book, Van Dyk probes how it was that he was let go and who the actors were, players in what he calls “the Trade, the growing international business of political kidnappings, according to the US Treasury the most lucrative source of income, outside of state sponsorship, for illegal groups.” Inevitably, all paths point back to Pakistani military intelligence, without whose sanction, Van Dyk charges, the kidnapping would not have happened. The author can be winningly rueful, as when he recounts the exuberance that led him to Afghanistan in the first place. “I wanted to be with the Taliban, not just because I was curious about their faith,” he writes, “but because they represented a chance to do something worthwhile, and because they were an echo of the warmth of the mujahideen and that earlier, exciting time when I lived with them. It was the lure of the wild.” Van Dyk also examines the cases of others who were kidnapped at about the same time, such as a New York Times journalist whom the Taliban called “the Red Rooster,” just as they had called Van Dyk “Golden Goose”—meaning, in both instances, a source of ready cash; they were certainly luckier than those who, like Daniel Pearl, were murdered.
Anyone with an interest in the geopolitics of the global war on terrorism will find value in this account.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61039-431-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2017
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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