A memorable addition to the literature of modern war.
A penetrating record of the last days of Saddam’s Iraq.
Newsday correspondent McAllester (Beyond the Mountains of the Damned, 2002) came to Baghdad under the burden of fate-tempting restrictions: “Unable to obtain regular journalist visas, we had entered Iraq on journalists-with-human-shields visas, which only allowed us to cover the activities of the peace activists who said they were determined to bunk down at facilities such as hospitals and schools in the hope of preventing bombing attacks.” No story there, of course, so McAllester and his surfer-dude photographer wander through the glowing streets of the capital in the wake of the Allies’ air assaults, looking for the Big Story. The snippets that make their way into these pages are fascinating: Uday Hussein’s unhappiness over “the accurate American targeting of his real estate,” a door-to-door search for a downed American pilot, the gloomy certainty of Iraqi dissidents that the American assault would be half-hearted and that Saddam would remain in power. McAllester’s narrative takes a darker twist when, soon after the bombs begin to fall, he is arrested on suspicion of espionage and spirited away to Abu Ghraib, Iraq’s worst prison. His imprisonment and interrogation were far less than homegrown opponents of the regime had to endure, of course—as McAllester writes, “my eight days of incarceration barely registered on [one longtime prisoner’s] scale of suffering.” Still, they were plenty bad, even though he had prepared for the eventuality by having taken a survival-in-hostile-conditions course a few months earlier. (“Be worried if your captors let you see their faces,” he writes. “That means they might already be planning to kill you. I could see their faces.”) Freed a few days before the Marines arrived in Baghdad, McAllester enjoys a rare moment: the chance to confront one of his captors, who calmly explains that he was just doing his job in a country that, as McAllester portrays it, was itself one big prison.
A memorable addition to the literature of modern war.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-058819-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
