A highly detailed, engrossing work that incorporates a history of fledgling Georgia amid the author’s well-demonstrated...
For 10 years, lawyer Pullara pursued the mysterious 1993 murder of diplomat and CIA agent Freddie Woodruff in the Soviet Republic of Georgia. In his first book, he unspools his findings.
An expert in complex commercial litigation who felt a “suspicion about the sincere pronouncements by the US government” after he had completed a long investigation into the dubious circumstances of his father’s death in the Vietnam War, the author, who knew Woodruff’s family earlier in his life, did not buy the official version of Woodruff’s murder. After postings in Berlin, Leningrad, Ankara, and Ethiopia, Woodruff was working at the embassy in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi when he was murdered on a mountain road (supposedly “a random act of violence”) during a “sightseeing trip” in August 1993. The car had been driven by the chief bodyguard of Eduard Shevardnadze, who had become acting chairman of the State Council of Georgia after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. As Pullara vividly recounts, so many of the details didn’t make sense—e.g., that Woodruff was in Georgia to train Shevardnadze’s security force, as well as the numerous ill-fitting circumstances about the murder itself. Moreover, when the murder was conveniently blamed on Anzor Sharmaidze, a young former Soviet trainee, evidently under torture, the author sought to figure out the role CIA operations officer and secret Russian spy Aldrich Ames might have played in the affair; Ames was arrested by the FBI for espionage less than two weeks after Sharmaidze was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 1994. From diving deep into FBI documents to repeatedly visiting the country and tracking down the shadowy protagonists, Pullara does a fine job of sleuthing to get at what he believes is the truth.
A highly detailed, engrossing work that incorporates a history of fledgling Georgia amid the author’s well-demonstrated “passion for mysteries…[and] memory for trivia.”Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5213-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
"There's got to be something wrong with somebody who'd do a thing like that." This is Perry Edward Smith, talking about himself. "Deal me out, baby...I'm a normal." This is Richard Eugene Hickock, talking about himself. They're as sick a pair as Leopold and Loeb and together they killed a mother, a father, a pretty 17-year-old and her brother, none of whom they'd seen before, in cold blood. A couple of days before they had bought a 100 foot rope to garrote them—enough for ten people if necessary. This small pogrom took place in Holcomb, Kansas, a lonesome town on a flat, limitless landscape: a depot, a store, a cafe, two filling stations, 270 inhabitants. The natives refer to it as "out there." It occurred in 1959 and Capote has spent five years, almost all of the time which has since elapsed, in following up this crime which made no sense, had no motive, left few clues—just a footprint and a remembered conversation. Capote's alternating dossier Shifts from the victims, the Clutter family, to the boy who had loved Nancy Clutter, and her best friend, to the neighbors, and to the recently paroled perpetrators: Perry, with a stunted child's legs and a changeling's face, and Dick, who had one squinting eye but a "smile that works." They had been cellmates at the Kansas State Penitentiary where another prisoner had told them about the Clutters—he'd hired out once on Mr. Clutter's farm and thought that Mr. Clutter was perhaps rich. And this is the lead which finally broke the case after Perry and Dick had drifted down to Mexico, back to the midwest, been seen in Kansas City, and were finally picked up in Las Vegas. The last, even more terrible chapters, deal with their confessions, the law man who wanted to see them hanged, back to back, the trial begun in 1960, the post-ponements of the execution, and finally the walk to "The Corner" and Perry's soft-spoken words—"It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize." It's a magnificent job—this American tragedy—with the incomparable Capote touches throughout. There may never have been a perfect crime, but if there ever has been a perfect reconstruction of one, surely this must be it.
Pub Date: Jan. 7, 1965
ISBN: 0375507906
Page Count: 343
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1965
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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