Too narrowly focused for general readers, Sullivan may find an audience among CIA or Vietnam scholars. (35 photos, 7 maps)
A memoir of CIA polygraph examiner Sullivan’s turbulent 1971–75 tour in Vietnam.
A career CIA employee (1968–99) and current lecturer at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, is among the most qualified people in America to write an intimate and frank account of the intelligence community’s role in Vietnam. Sullivan, after a five-year stint in the army, shifted career paths and began study at Michigan State University. There, he became disgusted with the antiwar protesters and signed up with the CIA as a polygraph analyst. His calm and methodical approach to polygraph testing produced notably reliable results, and as he began to advance in the agency, his superiors assigned him to duty in Vietnam. Sullivan details his encounters with key players in Southeast Asia, such as Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker and CIA Station Chief Theodore Shackley, as well as various subordinate agents and analysts who actually executed the often dangerous American intelligence operations. He asserts that the majority of senior policymakers often refused to acknowledge or send forward negative reports about the war, despite the voluminous intelligence that the US was losing ground with the South Vietnamese population. Sullivan further recalls the depravity, corruption, and drunkenness that pervaded the lower echelons of the Southeast Asian intelligence community. These reactions to Vietnam complicated an already difficult job and threw him into conflict with agents and superiors that demanded specific polygraph results to further their individual agendas. Unfortunately, the complexities of Sullivan’s Vietnam experience overwhelm his narrative. Rather than a compelling mosaic about his experience, Sullivan’s story reads more like a chronicle of petty office squabbles.
Too narrowly focused for general readers, Sullivan may find an audience among CIA or Vietnam scholars. (35 photos, 7 maps)Pub Date: May 30, 2002
ISBN: 0-7006-1168-1
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kansas
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
