A lively and insightful exploration of an overlooked international alliance.
An eye-opening account of America’s relations with Poland and its intelligence service.
In 1994, journalist Pomfret was the Washington Postbureau chief for Eastern Europe, located in Warsaw, when he heard a rumor that Polish spies had rescued six Americans from Saddam Hussein’s forces in 1990. Tracking down the story was no easy matter, but his efforts have produced an entertaining political history of Poland since World War II, almost entirely focused on its intelligence service, which, under Soviet domination, rivaled the KGB in its ability to steal U.S. secrets. Unlike other Eastern European satellites that purged their security agencies after achieving independence in 1989, Poland’s new democratic leadership decided that it was a bad idea to create an army of well-trained, unemployed opponents. Consequently, its new security service retained thousands of ex-communists who switched sides and served loyally. As Pomfret notes, CIA leaders were delighted. As one explained, “How could you not benefit from dealing with the Poles who lived in the most dangerous piece of real estate in Europe?...They’d had forty-five years of liaison with the KGB…and they knew tons more about the Soviets.” The author ably demonstrates how, almost immediately, this policy produced benefits that have lasted into the present. Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait trapped many Americans, among them those six officers privy to secret information. The CIA asked for Poland’s help, and Poland’s security service assigned agents to the task. Pomfret delivers a nail-biting account of the escape that Polish agents engineered, featuring a hair-rising drive across Iraq to the border and safety. Long a faithful ally, Poland participated, despite misgivings, in the American debacles in Afghanistan and the second Iraq War, hosting a “black site” where investigators could question terrorist prisoners free of American legal protection. In return, the U.S. provided generous foreign aid, subsidized its intelligence service, and (sadly) kept quiet as, in recent decades, Poland has elected right-wing, authoritarian governments.
A lively and insightful exploration of an overlooked international alliance.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-29605-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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