An entertaining work duly informed by Duffy’s knowledge of both the war and New York City.
A sympathetic portrait of a reluctant, little-known German-American double agent on the eve of World War II.
There are several spy rings that overlap and converge in journalist Duffy’s (The Killing of Major Denis Mahon: A Mystery of Old Ireland, 2007, etc.) immensely readable account, all involving the German immigrant’s notion of “patriotism.” For many of the select machinists who worked at the Carl L. Norden production facility at 80 Lafayette St. in lower Manhattan, being a good German meant delivering blueprints of the top-secret “bombsight” mechanism to the Abwehr to improve the Luftwaffe’s bombing accuracy and thus “save millions and lots of time.” Many immigrant laborers were virulently anti-communist and members of the right-wing German American Bund, which paraded openly its support of National Socialism through the streets of the German neighborhood of Yorkville at a time before the FBI, and its emergent director J. Edgar Hoover, had declared the group an internal threat. Yet the other kind of patriotism involved loyalty to one’s adopted country, personified by William G. Sebold (1899-1970), who fled the political chaos of Germany in the 1920s and became a naturalized American citizen in 1936. By an extraordinarily unlucky turn of events, when he returned to Germany to visit his mother at the outbreak of war, he was roped into working for the Abwehr in order to get back to the United States. Unbeknownst to the Nazis, he had also contacted the FBI; among the German immigrant community of Yorkville and the Brooklyn Sperry Gyroscope Company, they uncovered a whole nest of subversives offering defense secrets to the Nazis. Sebold ultimately helped to convict 33 traitors in 1941 in what was known as the Duquesne Spy Ring—the first feather in Hoover’s hat. While colorful personalities proliferate throughout the narrative, the understated character of Sebold gleams.
An entertaining work duly informed by Duffy’s knowledge of both the war and New York City.Pub Date: July 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6795-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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 2025 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.
