Outdoing the best spy fiction, former CIA inspector general Waller (Beyond the Khyber Pass, 1990, etc.) tells a series of riveting stories about the hidden war between the Germans and the Allies in WW II. From the beginning, the intelligence war was a central element of the conflict. Waller relates some well-known stories, like the breaking of the British naval fleet codes by the Germans, which contributed to the great success of the Nazi U-boat effort, and the similar breaking of the German Enigma enciphering machine by Allied intelligence, which allowed the British to anticipate German strategy on the continent. He also offers speculations on the intelligence background of WW II riddles like the Hess flight to Scotland and the assassination of Reinhold Heydrich, one of the most violent and ambitious members of Himmler's inner circle. However, Waller also travels some less familiar ground, particularly in his detailed profile of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the brilliant, enigmatic head of the Abwehr, the military intelligence unit of the German Ministry of War. Canaris despised Nazism, secretly assisted the Allied war effort, and ultimately participated in the doomed 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler. Waller also describes Operation X, which used Pius XII, an old friend of Canaris's, to help relay messages from the German Resistance movement to British intelligence; the ``Venlo incident'' in 1939, which cost Britain virtually its entire intelligence network on the continent; Allen Dulles's secret work as a ``special representative'' of FDR in Switzerland; and the intelligence intrigues surrounding the implementation of Hitler's invasion of France and his plan to invade the Soviet Union. More than a deft account of some some intriguing spy stories, Waller's history reminds us how crucial intelligence operations were to the war in Europe and to the Allies' ultimate success.
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-44826-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996
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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