A useful addition to the literature of 9/11.
A pilot reconstructs the real-time response of America’s commercial airline industry and military to the terror in the skies on 9/11.
By now it’s clear that no single book can capture the full dimensions of that momentous day. Patrick Creed and Rick Newman’s upcoming Firefight: Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11 (2008), for example, deals solely and memorably with putting out the inferno caused by the crash of American Flight 77. Relying on tapes, transcripts and interviews, Spencer offers another perspective on the fate of that flight and numerous other incredible events in the American sky that morning. Saddled with outdated equipment and communications systems, the military’s air defense was organized to anticipate an attack from missiles or airplanes approaching the borders. Forced to improvise, the Air Force quickly scrambled jets and, for the first time in American history, found itself flying combat patrol in American skies filled with hundreds of airliners. Contrary to the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission, Spencer argues that the military could have shot down United 93, the last of the four hijacked aircraft, had it continued toward the nation’s capital. For a generation of industry civilians—pilots, air-traffic controllers, regulatory officials—for whom hijackings were a relic of the ’60s and ’70s, these attacks broke all known rules. Instead of commandeering airplanes to make a political statement, to seek asylum or ransom, the al-Qaeda operatives converted planes into missiles. How the industry moved from surprise to bafflement to comprehension, to an unprecedented ordering of all planes out of the sky, is the core of Spencer’s story. Although she depends too heavily on direct transcriptions and sometimes fails to smoothly integrate the many strands of her narrative, Spencer manages to convey a sense of the excruciating problems posed that morning to anyone charged with wringing order from the chaos in the sky.
A useful addition to the literature of 9/11.Pub Date: June 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5925-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
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
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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