Though sometimes bogged down in legal minutia, quite understandably, Mahler’s fluent account of events is essential reading...
Near-exhaustive account of what some Supreme Court watchers consider “the most important decision on presidential power ever.”
Three days after 9/11, George Bush set in motion a program to try suspected terrorists as war criminals, not civilians, through military tribunals. The tribunals would be convened abroad, not just for security reasons but also to keep strict control over what information could leave the courtroom. An air base in Germany was considered and rejected, lest the Germans “try to exert a degree of authority over the facility,” as New York Times Magazine contributor Mahler (Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, 2005) notes. The Marshall Islands and other Pacific outposts lacked sufficient infrastructure. But Guantánamo Bay served well—it was remote from the press, yet accessible to the mainland. Up early for trial was a Yemeni jihadist named Salim Hamdan, initially recruited to go to Tajikistan and join an Islamic insurgency against the Russian-backed government. Instead, he fell in with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and worked as his bodyguard and driver. Captured in the American invasion, Hamdan was transferred to Cuba in December 2003. He made an ideal, low-hanging-fruit kind of defendant, since, among other things, he hadn’t been rendered to a third country for interrogation, “which would open the door for his defense attorney to raise questions about his treatment.” His defense attorney was a troubled naval officer who both belonged to the ACLU and recognized that he was committing career suicide, and who drew on a wide network of legal allies to press a constitutional case that argued, at its basis, that the president was overstepping the bounds of his authority. The argument made for strange allies (Ken Starr, anyone?) and an impressive array of foes, but it worked, convincing even a conservative Supreme Court. Naturally, the military and administration are working to get around the Court’s decision, but for a brief moment, Mahler concludes, “the system worked.”
Though sometimes bogged down in legal minutia, quite understandably, Mahler’s fluent account of events is essential reading for students of constitutional law—and anyone concerned with civil rights.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-374-22320-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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
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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