A scathing exposé of drug trafficking, homicide, and suicide in the U.S. military.
The dark side of one of the nation’s top military bases.
Harp, an investigative reporter, focuses on Fort Bragg, the North Carolina installation that is home to the Joint Special Operations Command, which the author calls a “secret killing machine” at the center of U.S. counterterrorism efforts. Troops stationed at Fort Bragg, he says, have shown a disproportionate rate of deaths by drug overdose, suicide, and homicide. The book examines several cases involving Special Forces soldiers based at Fort Bragg, veterans living in the nearby community, and civilians in the drug trade. One case involved the off-base shooting of one soldier by another following a drug-fueled weekend. Both the local police and military authorities accepted the shooter’s claim of self-defense and, the author says, kept the victim’s family and outside investigators in the dark—a pattern he says is typical of cases involving Fort Bragg troops. The high rate of drug use, Harp notes, is in part caused by the reliance of combat troops on painkillers and stimulants to get them through the stress of life in a war zone. When the war zone was Afghanistan—a center of opium production—heroin became more prevalent. Drug dependency continued when troops were rotated home, and a supply network (predictably) arose. The book unflinchingly faults presidential administrations that have ignored the PTSD and devaluing of human life that the “targeted assassination” operations create among troops caught up in a “forever-war paradigm.” An unsettling read, the book will nevertheless enlighten anyone concerned about U.S. foreign policy and the role of the military in it.
A scathing exposé of drug trafficking, homicide, and suicide in the U.S. military.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2025
ISBN: 9780593655085
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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