A lively, frightening peek behind the curtain at nuclear weapons negotiations between the U.S. and North Korea.
On American “miscalculations, misunderstandings, and myths.”
Wit, a fellow in Asian Security Studies at the Henry L. Stimson Center, draws on more than 300 interviews—and his own astute observations as a participant in decades of roller-coaster nuclear weapons negotiations—for his fast-paced and eye-opening account of North Korean–American nuclear weapons diplomacy. The author reveals a fascinating terrain of shifting priorities and players that are shaping an increasingly dangerous world. He brings considerable clarity and pithy writing to bear on a confusing muddle of ambivalent diplomacy, political infighting, and changes in direction that have marked U.S. attempts to thwart North Korea’s efforts to join the ranks of nuclear powers. Process, politics, and personalities are foregrounded as the baton passes from president to president over six administrations, from Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump. The author’s adroit descriptions capture the flavor and pace of events. Throughout, the story circles back to the chilling consequences if diplomacy fails and the world tips into nuclear conflict—a possibility that motivates participants on all sides to continue the dialogue, even when it proceeds by fits and starts or stalls entirely. He writes, “Today, North Korea can inflict devastation on major American cities, killing hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of people in thirty minutes, a far cry from 1994 when it didn’t even have a single nuclear weapon.” Ultimately, Wit says, “two presidents, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, bear special responsibility since the greatest threat emerged during their time in office.” North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is presented here in a nuanced portrait as the leader of a small country “engaged in provocative behavior intended to convince Washington to take it seriously.” This intriguing survey of a critical global struggle is readable and sobering. Those wishing to dive deeper will find ample footnotes pointing to primary sources.
A lively, frightening peek behind the curtain at nuclear weapons negotiations between the U.S. and North Korea.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780300278774
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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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