An engaging look at controversial defendants from the 1940s to the ’70s.
A meticulous legal examination of the evidence against famous espionage and terrorism defendants.
The majority of Roberts’ debut study focuses on post–World War II America: the era of Cold War paranoia, real and perceived Soviet threats, McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Using a large dose of common sense, the author analyzes testimony from espionage cases involving U.S. government employees Alger Hiss, David Zablodowsky, Oliver Edmund Clubb, Harry Dexter White, William Remington and Judith Coplon. The most compelling passages zero in on Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, two colorful characters who confessed to acts of treason and then testified against their alleged accomplices in order to avoid prosecution. Roberts suggests that the FBI and other authorities had invested so much in these unreliable witnesses that they went to great lengths to prop up their veneers of respectability—despite the witnesses’ odd behavior and questionable claims. Toward the end of the book, the author abruptly shifts to the Irish Republican Army bombings in Britain during the 1970s and the suspects referred to as the Guildford Four, the Maguire Seven and the Birmingham Six. Here, he continues to attack official versions of events by underscoring their flawed assumptions and logistical improbabilities. However, he doesn’t explain his rationale for including such disparate historical contexts until the final chapter: “Both countries, and both periods, are linked by the fact that in each there was an urgent need to find someone who was guilty; and that in both, stories of the most preposterous kind were believed.” Thus, readers might want to begin with the last chapter to contextualize the interwoven tales of intrigue recounted in the rest of the book. Fortunately, the author provides a helpful index of the myriad figures, organizations and themes that resurface throughout the text. As debates about the guilt or innocence of these individuals rage on, this book will certainly stoke that fire.
An engaging look at controversial defendants from the 1940s to the ’70s.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2012
ISBN: 978-1456789862
Page Count: 300
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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