While the book suffers from the fact that the Secret Service is understandably reluctant to reveal any explosives that have...
The latest treat for dog lovers by Goodavage (Top Dog: The Story of Marine Hero Lucca, 2014, etc.) takes readers into the world of the canines and handlers who protect the president and the White House.
The Secret Service is notoriously closed to journalists, which means that the author was prohibited from revealing much of the information she gathered in her interviews and restricted to giving first names and initials for most of her interviewees. While hardly a hard-hitting investigation of the role of canines in the sometimes controversial agency, her account will satisfy those curious about the lives of working dogs and their people. Goodavage covers a number of such comradeships, weaving them into the story of spunky Hurricane, who under the instructions of handler Marshall M. took down a “fence jumper” at the White House in 2014. Intriguing chapters explore the selection of dogs from a training facility in a small town in Indiana, where the Belgian Malinois, who make up the larger part of the guard, and bomb-sniffing dogs are brought after being raised for a couple of years in Europe, and the work life of the so-called “Friendly Dogs,” unassuming, floppy-eared canines whose handlers cover the streets near the White House seeking out the scent of explosives on individuals. The author has a tendency to go off on tangents, seemingly depending on people with whom she had more extensive interviews: one chapter, for example, delves into the life history of a handler who spent his childhood in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and another examines the veterinary history of a dog subject to heat sickness.
While the book suffers from the fact that the Secret Service is understandably reluctant to reveal any explosives that have been discovered or subjects disarmed under the watch of its canine patrollers, Goodavage’s subjects and their companions are quirky and dedicated enough to engage readers wondering about those dogs on the White House lawn.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-98473-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2016
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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