A lucid history of the Troubles in all its manifold complexities.
A revealing story of an Irish Republican Army bombing against the vast backdrop of Irish history.
“In the tangled, tortuous history of Britain and Ireland, the past is not a settled matter,” writes Guardian journalist Carroll. “There is no grand, shared narrative. Atrocities and justified actions are in the eye of the beholder.” Certainly, terrorism is how Margaret Thatcher’s government characterized IRA attacks on British troops and civilians in the 1980s. At the center of the narrative is the 1984 bombing of a Brighton hotel where Thatcher addressed a Conservative Party conference. “Thatcher lived,” writes Carroll. “Well, she and her government now knew that the Troubles could not be contained. The Provos had brought the war not just to England but to her inner sanctum.” The bomber returned to Ireland and then traveled back to England to launch a planned campaign of bombings of British resorts to ruin the tourist economy and frighten the British populace. Although Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams—who, notes Carroll, refused to talk with him for this book—claimed to have no knowledge of the IRA’s military campaign against Thatcher’s government, the bombers had a role in Adams’ “grand strategy.” They met with less favor on the part of former backer Moammar Gadhafi, who dropped his support for the IRA and “sought other, bloodier ways to punish his enemies.” Carroll closes his tense, riveting text by considering the what-ifs and long-term effects of the attack on Brighton—for which, he notes, the bomber later repented, sort of, after a lengthy prison sentence. One of those effects was Thatcher’s increasing hatred of the European Union, of which Ireland was part, which led to Brexit, which in turn is leading to a growing call to integrate Northern Ireland into the Republic. “In the end,” Carroll concludes, “it may be Margaret Thatcher’s legacy, not IRA bombs, that delivers a united Ireland.”
A lucid history of the Troubles in all its manifold complexities.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9780593419496
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
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
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
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