A true-crime saga that reads with the immediacy of a thriller.
From the author of Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS (2015), a swift-moving account of the infamous terrorist who boasted of killing 83 people and ordering the death of a thousand more.
Born Ilich Ramírez Sánchez in Venezuela, Carlos was just one of the countless fake names that “the Jackal” used. It was the one that stuck and the one that he used in Warrick’s opening episode, when Carlos and crew attacked a meeting of OPEC ministers in Vienna in 1975. Just whom he was working for is unclear: It could have been the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Muammar Gaddafi, or any of a number of clients who funded his “new kind of state-sponsored terrorism.” Nominally a communist, Carlos was even financed by former Nazis as well as the KGB and Romania’s Securitate. Already wanted for a string of killings in France and England, he would gain international notoriety for the OPEC attack and subsequent escape, as well as plane hijackings, bombings, assassinations, and cruel operations, such as tossing a grenade among civilians in a Paris shopping mall in 1974. Trained by the PFLP in a “summer camp with guns,” Carlos eventually went out on his own, skillfully amassing a fortune that funded a lavish, drunken lifestyle that occupied his time behind the Iron Curtain in Hungary and even in backwaters like Sudan. Warrick skillfully assembles the details of Carlos’ adventures in terrorism, which earned him almost legendary status: “He was ruthless, killing without remorse or mercy. Most astonishingly, he was capable of carrying out attacks in the heart of Europe’s great capitals and then vanishing without a trace.” He was finally tracked down in Khartoum in 1993 by a CIA agent who was “conducting surveillance on multiple terrorist groups,” and French agents spirited him away to prison outside Paris, near the scene of some of his most devious crimes. He is housed there to this day.
A true-crime saga that reads with the immediacy of a thriller.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2026
ISBN: 9781668070550
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: today
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
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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