A significant account of the wartime exploits in China of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), the intelligence agency that was later to become the CIA. Yu's (History/US Naval Academy) is the first history based on original US archives and on recently published articles and memoirs in China. The fighting among the 20 US bureaucratic agencies and dozen independent intelligence organizations in Chungking seems to have exceeded in intensity anything they were able to mobilize against the Japanese, at least until the last months of the war. The main contenders were the US army commanders Stilwell and later Wedemeyer; Tai Li, the head of Chinese intelligence; Milton Miles, the head of naval intelligence; William Donovan, chosen by Roosevelt to set up the OSS; the crusty American ambassador Gauss; and a swirling, ever-changing group of contending individuals and agencies seeking to push themselves and sabotage everyone else. These included—though for a long time the US participants seemed oblivious to it—both the British, who didn't want China to be too strong after the war, and the Communists, who wanted to undermine the Nationalist government, get weapons and money from the US, and build up a reputation as the main enemy of the Japanese at the very time that they were engaged in making deals with them. The main winners were the OSS, which seems to have emerged largely unscathed almost in spite of itself; and the Communists, whose shrewd infiltration of the British, the French, and above all the Nationalists was truly remarkable. On the critical question of the extent to which the Communists infiltrated the Americans, Yu is circumspect. He describes, for example, the extraordinary assistance given them by a second-ranking State Department employee like John Paton Davies without analyzing his motives. It is one of the few deficiencies in an important if profoundly depressing story of bureaucratic infighting, jealousies, incomprehension, and ultimate failure.
Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-300-06698-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
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
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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