soldiers must have felt.
A monograph about a long series of covert operations, directed by the CIA and the US Defense Department, that attempted
to infiltrate agents into North Vietnam for purposes of intelligence, sabotage, and psychological warfare. Conboy (Shadow War, not reviewed) and Andrad‚ (Trial by Fire, not reviewed) interviewed CIA and military personnel and spent much time in Vietnam talking with former commandos and ex-POWs. They found that one of the biggest frustrations of the US leaders was their inability to form effective resistance groups against the North Vietnamese Communists: infiltration teams of South Vietnamese, Taiwanese, and US Special Forces were soon captured, killed, or (in some cases) turned into double agents. Although Conboy and Andrad‚ offer only limited information on what was accomplished in terms of espionage and sabotage during the course of the war, they do shed new light on the famous Gulf of Tonkin incident: they maintain that when the USS Maddox was fired upon by North Vietnamese forces (an event that led Congress to give full war powers to President Johnson), the ship was already, in fact, on North Vietnamese positions—an act of war that belied the fiction that the US was not involved as an adversary but only in an advisory role. The authors see the failures of US covert action as a strategic disaster, since their lack of success led Washington policymakers to revert to "gradual" large-scale attacks conducted by air, artillery, and infantry sweeps—tactics that prolonged the conflict and caused mounting casualties. A depressing experience of a discouraging chapter in US history—in more ways than one: the dry recounting of endless military reports leaves out much of the human drama of courage, sacrifice, and suffering that the gallant and nameless young
soldiers must have felt.Pub Date: March 16, 2000
ISBN: 0-7006-1002-2
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kansas
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
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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