A vivid recounting of an international tragedy.
A web of intrigue surrounds a mysterious plane crash that killed the U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961.
On Sept. 18, 1961, Hammarskjöld died in a crash during a mission to the Congo to mediate a vicious war that had intensified since 1960. Journalist Somaiya, a former correspondent for the New York Times and contributor to the Guardian, among other venues, draws on interviews and government archives to create a tense narrative that reveals the “web of seasoned, brutal spies and assassins,” dirty deals, and ferocious hatreds that, he argues compellingly, led to the downing of the plane. Hammarskjöld, the author discovered, was caught in the crosshairs of geopolitical conflict. Russia hated him “as an agent of the West,” and the West hated him for “opening the door to Russia in the Congo.” The Congolese blamed him for the death of Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first prime minister, whom Hammarskjöld had tried to protect. The Belgians, who since the time of King Leopold had ruthlessly exploited the Congo and oppressed its populace, hated Hammarskjöld, as well, because he opposed the secession of a mineral-rich region from the rest of the country. After the crash, the wreckage was examined by Rhodesians, who hated the U.N. Although the official verdict maintained that the crash had been an accident, over the years, “a band of ingenious devotees” disputed that conclusion. Theories abounded: that there had been a hijacker aboard, that a mercenary plane had attacked it, even that Hammarskjöld caused the crash in order to commit suicide. Finally, in 2014, the U.N. appointed Mohamed Chaude Othman, a Tanzanian judge, to reexamine the case, and although logs—and the airport manager—had conveniently disappeared, his evidence, added to Somaiya’s research, led the author to conclude that the plane did succumb to an aerial attack, orchestrated by one or many of the parties that desperately wanted Hammarskjöld gone.
A vivid recounting of an international tragedy.Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4555-3654-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections.
Tired of the lies about the 2020 election? Buckle up: Trump is just warming up, and his allies may be getting craftier.
“This is not a book about January 6, 2021. It is a book about January 6, 2025,” write legal scholars Lessig and Seligman. We are lucky, Lessig suggests, that John Eastman and his fellow plotters “picked the dumbest possible strategy for pursuing what we feared they were trying to accomplish”: namely, trying to convince Mike Pence that he had the constitutional authority to refuse to certify the results by which Joe Biden won the presidency. One might argue that the second dumbest strategy was to send an army of fascist goons to the Capitol to try to enforce Eastman’s argument. However, Lessig and Seligman argue, there are holes in the Constitution wide enough to drive a burning dumpster through, and they might allow an interested party to falsely claim victory in a closely contested race and win the election. The authors presume that any such gaming-the-system effort will come from MAGA Republicans, though they add that a Democrat could easily use the same tactics. Readers may need a law degree to follow some of the arguments, but others are quite accessible. One argument that Lessig has been mounting for some time, for instance, is that the winner-take-all method employed by most states for electoral votes needs to be replaced with an apportionment system so that the Electoral College count will align with the popular vote. On that score, the authors warn, the prospect of rogue electors—or more, rogue governors who control those electors—is very real, and numerous other threats could enable someone smarter than the last bunch to mount “a cataclysmic attack on our democracy.”
Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780300270792
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
An essential account of a chaotic administration that, Woodward makes painfully clear, is incapable of governing.
That thing in the air that is deadlier than even your “strenuous flus”? Trump knew—and did nothing about it.
The big news from veteran reporter Woodward’s follow-up to Fear has been widely reported: Trump was fully aware at the beginning of 2020 that a pandemic loomed and chose to downplay it, causing an untold number of deaths and crippling the economy. His excuse that he didn’t want to cause a panic doesn’t fly given that he trades in fear and division. The underlying news, however, is that Trump participated in this book, unlike in the first, convinced by Lindsey Graham that Woodward would give him a fair shake. Seventeen interviews with the sitting president inform this book, as well as extensive digging that yields not so much news as confirmation: Trump has survived his ineptitude because the majority of Congressional Republicans go along with the madness because they “had made a political survival decision” to do so—and surrendered their party to him. The narrative often requires reading between the lines. Graham, though a byword for toadyism, often reins Trump in; Jared Kushner emerges as the real power in the West Wing, “highly competent but often shockingly misguided in his assessments”; Trump admires tyrants, longs for their unbridled power, resents the law and those who enforce it, and is quick to betray even his closest advisers; and, of course, Trump is beholden to Putin. Trump occasionally emerges as modestly self-aware, but throughout the narrative, he is in a rage. Though he participated, he said that he suspected this to be “a lousy book.” It’s not—though readers may wish Woodward had aired some of this information earlier, when more could have been done to stem the pandemic. When promoting Fear, the author was asked for his assessment of Trump. His reply: “Let’s hope to God we don’t have a crisis.” Multiple crises later, Woodward concludes, as many observers have, “Trump is the wrong man for the job.”
An essential account of a chaotic administration that, Woodward makes painfully clear, is incapable of governing.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982131-73-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
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