Good wartime niche history.
World War II skullduggery.
Harding, author of The Last Battle (2013), reveals that J. Edgar Hoover, whose FBI fought espionage in North and South America, was certain that Allied armies reconquering Europe would reveal American traitors who had welcomed the Nazi conquest and stayed behind. He wanted to send agents across the sea, but no one liked the idea: Army and Navy intelligence services were already on the spot. Years earlier, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had listened to a friend, William J. Donovan, propose a centralized agency to direct overseas counterintelligence and covert operations. This led to what became the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor of the CIA. Hoover tended to get what he wanted, so FBI agents began flying to Europe following the first Allied landings; they turned up genuine, if not key traitors. The sole familiar name was Ezra Pound (1885-1972) the renowned poet and critic who had moved to Italy in 1924, embraced fascism, and recorded hundreds of radio propaganda broadcasts. Unlike other collaborators, he never denied his actions or expressed regret but struck his captors as a crackpot. After spending 13 years in a mental hospital, Pound returned to Italy until his death. Genuine spies existed, but Nazi espionage was largely incompetent. Mostly, there were Americans who needed to explain themselves. Many wealthy expatriates had no objection to fascism and obtained exemption from regulations by entertaining the occupiers and doing favors. Others were American citizens drafted into the German armed forces, or working for them. All claimed to be victims, and some were telling the truth. Overall, Harding examines a lesser-known aspect of the war, and readers will enjoy detours into the lives of FBI agents and the endless turf quarrels between Army intelligence, Navy intelligence, the OSS, and FBI.
Good wartime niche history.Pub Date: tomorrow
ISBN: 9780806544137
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Citadel/Kensington
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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
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