While the best examination of our failure to take al-Qaeda seriously remains Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower (2006),...
A meticulous history of the USS Cole attack and America’s response, which Lippold, the ship’s commander at the time, considers shamefully weak, laying the groundwork for what followed.
On Oct. 12, 2000, suicide bombers attacked the Cole in the port of Aden in Yemen, killing 17 crewmen and injuring twice as many. Eleven months later, 9/11 captured our attention, but the Cole attack remains a vivid memory for the ship’s commander. After reviewing his 20-year career in the peacetime Navy, Lippold cuts to the immense explosion, which everyone first assumed was a refueling accident. There follows nearly 200 pages of exhaustive description of the devastating damage, the crew’s heroic response, which saved the ship from sinking, and 20 days of assistance, repairs, politics and investigation that did not end when the Cole returned to the United States. In the final 100 pages, the author recounts the fate of the ship (repaired), the lives of the survivors and bereaved and the many inquiries: into the crime, into the Navy’s antiterrorism policy and into Lippold’s conduct. Traditionally, losing a ship ends its commander’s career. Not concealing his resentment, Lippold recounts several historical exceptions and then describes in painful detail how his superiors absolved him of blame but surrendered to political pressure. He was repeatedly denied promotion and retired in 2007. Unlike many military memoirs, this one shows little partisan bias, as the author expresses equal contempt for the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations.
While the best examination of our failure to take al-Qaeda seriously remains Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower (2006), Lippold delivers a personal, opinionated account of the last outrage before 9/11 which should have galvanized our leaders but didn’t.Pub Date: April 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61039-124-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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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