If Orestes Lorenzo didn't exist, Hollywood might have had to invent him—if it dared. In the early spring of 1991, the dashing fighter pilot fled Cuba in a Soviet-built MiG-23 and made it to Boca Chica Naval Air Station in the Florida Keys. Granted political asylum by the US, he immediately began trying to deliver his wife and two young sons as well, but despite repeated appeals to human- rights groups and world leaders (Bush, Castro, Gorbachev, et al.), his efforts proved futile. Undaunted, Lorenzo acquired an aging Cessna, flew back to Cuba, snatched his family from a busy coastal highway, and brought ``a plane filled with love'' back to America. Not too surprisingly, the adventure and romance of the Lorenzo story have captured the attention of the media and a public hungry for heroes. Liable to be lost in the show-biz hype about daredevil escapes, heart-rending separations, and conflicting political systems, unfortunately, is the fact that the former major has written a suspenseful and genuinely affecting account of his experiences. Among other matters, the Russian-trained aviator (now 37) offers a tellingly detailed appraisal of what it was like for him and his wife (a dentist) to come of age during the early years of Castro's revolution. Covered as well are the author's combat service in Angola (where Cuban forces were propping up a Marxist regime) and subsequent posting to the USSR at a time when glasnost was sweeping through Eastern Europe. Though on an upwardly mobile career track when he returned home, Lorenzo (with considerable support from his devoted spouse) resolved to break with Communism: The rest of the tale is, so to speak, history. Certain to grip the imagination and emotions (and to be published in both English and Spanish language editions). (First printing of 150,000; first serial rights to Vanity Fair; TV rights to Hearst Entertainment)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-10008-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1993
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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