Quaintly detailed, if frustrating, Americana, with glimpses of Big Brother ever lurking in the background.
Genesis and evolution of the polygraph, a spurious device that remains a pillar of US law enforcement and national security even though it doesn’t work—except when it does.
Alder (History/Northwestern Univ.), who received great acclaim for his history of the metric system (The Measure of All Things, 2002), meticulously traces the early fascination surrounding the supposed science—but mostly art—of identifying intentional deception. John Larson, a psychologist patterning his work after William Marston, a Harvard professor who noted blood-pressure changes correlated to intentional lying in research subjects, teamed in the early 1920s with legendary Berkeley police chief August Vollmer to bring polygraphic techniques to law enforcement. Larson’s initial foray, an attempt to solve a series of thefts at a local sorority house, was immediately beset with the ambiguities and shortcomings that have since plagued automated lie detection: “Larson unmasked midnight poker games,” Alder notes, “petty shoplifters, pregnancies, and attempted abortions, often without solving the original crime itself.” What followed as Larson, with his young protégé, tinkerer Leonarde Keeler, and Vollmer gravitated toward larger venues of crime in Los Angeles and Chicago, were decades of abuse of a technology that remains a uniquely American article of faith. One often repeated FBI ploy is calling in a suspect to inform him he failed his polygraph test from the day before—true or not—to elicit a confession. Yet Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling and O.J. Simpson both hired polygraphists to produce a record—Skilling liked his and published it; O.J. was reportedly not thrilled with his. And in today’s heightened atmosphere of terror threats, the CIA teaches the same agents who administer polygraph tests how to beat them. The essential contradiction persists: Most courts don’t accept polygraph test results as formal evidence, yet to refuse one (everybody’s right by law) is inevitably seen as an admission of guilt.
Quaintly detailed, if frustrating, Americana, with glimpses of Big Brother ever lurking in the background.Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-5988-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
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 Yorker staff 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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