A principal virtue of TV-journalist Lohbeck's vivid account of his lengthy sojourn in Afghan combat zones is the light it sheds on the mujahideen groups that—despite various political/religious agendas, internecine rivalries, and fitful aid from Western allies- -managed to drive Soviet troops from their mountainous, hostile homeland. The only American journalist to make the savage undeclared war a full-time beat (mainly for CBS), Lohbeck first provides an overview of the primitive Muslim nation's history, which extends through Moscow's bootless efforts to support a reliably Communist government in Kabul by force of arms. The author offers instructive perspectives on the seven different resistance movements that fought or at least opposed USSR forces (and vied for sponsorship abroad, most often in the US). Early on, Lohbeck gained the confidence of an astute guerrilla chieftain named Abdul Haq, whose effective military operations he reported on many occasions. A muddy-boots correspondent, the author was wounded twice in the course of covering a host of deadly engagements between tribal irregulars and Soviet invaders. He also experienced some real, if not always mortal, dangers away from the front lines. Cases in point range from the Afghanistan's puppet regime putting a price on his head through stateside contact with Jay Pollard (a Naval Intelligence operative subsequently convicted of selling classified documents to Israel) to clashes with Pakistani officials (nominally committed to maintaining their country's neutrality), ad hominem assaults by fellow members of the press, and run-ins with CIA agents pursuing objectives at odds with those espoused by either Foggy Bottom or Capitol Hill. Dramatic, frequently affectionate, takes on fractious rebel warriors whose success has yet to yield them the victory they thought they'd won by nine years of bloody battle. (Foreword by Dan Rather; maps and eight pages of photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-89526-499-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1993
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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