A gutsy and disturbing exposé of U.S. civilian and military personnel out of control.
Based on what she learned as a translator at the notorious detention center, the American-born daughter of Afghan immigrants indicts the Bush administration’s treatment of prisoners there.
Khan explains how she found her way inside the heavily guarded Guantánamo Bay facility. Her parents had made sure she learned the Pashto language of their homeland, and while she was a law student at the University of Miami she became outraged by what she learned about Guantánamo operations, which she judged “a blatant affront” to American principles. Khan did not assume that all detainees at Guantánamo were innocent of terrorism-related crimes. She did believe, however, that each had the right to a lawyer and a fair hearing on the charges alleged by the federal government. She contacted Michael Ratner, an attorney at New York City’s Center for Constitutional Rights who was challenging government policy at Guantánamo. Because none of the lawyers trying to assist the detainees spoke Pashto, Khan’s usefulness was apparent from the time of her initial visit in 2006. Despite the security precautions, she kept notes; the text alternates between the stories she heard from detainees and her personal experiences inside the facility. She was stunned, for example, by the treatment of Ali Shah Mousovi, a pediatrician in Afghanistan who was classified as a terrorist for reasons that neither he nor Khan could discern. Arrested while trying to open a medical clinic in an Afghan town, Mousovi told Khan that he had been beaten, spat upon, stripped naked and forced to remain awake for days while standing stock-still. Khan heard similar accounts from detainee after detainee; she judged them credible, and her outrage grew. She holds back little in her searing debut, realizing that few other observers are in a position to reveal the truth as she found it.
A gutsy and disturbing exposé of U.S. civilian and military personnel out of control.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-58648-498-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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
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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