A valiantly researched study that resurrects a troubling episode in American history.
An accomplished journalist digs into the elusive and deeply troubling story behind the U.S. government’s postwar search for the perfect mind-control drug.
In this intriguing study, Kinzer (The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire, 2017, etc.) shows how U.S. officials drew on the findings of Nazi experiments on human “specimens” during World War II, which were exposed in the Nuremberg Trials, as well as notorious Japanese military trials that injected bacteria into and conducted lab tests on “expendable” humans. The U.S. enlisted many of these perpetrators to beef up postwar intelligence work. With the enemy now the Soviet Union and Red China, the U.S. needed to develop drugs that could be used as weapons of covert action. The 1947 National Security Act created the National Security Council and the CIA, and the new program to study chemical and biological agents was called Bluebird—supposedly to “make prisoners ‘sing like a bird.’ ” In the early 1950s, the program was taken over by Sidney Gottlieb, a Bronx-born scholar of agricultural biology who had been studying pharmaceuticals and agricultural chemicals at the Department of Agriculture when his academic mentors—e.g., Allen Dulles—lured him to the work of what Kinzer characterizes as “medical torture.” This meant dosing unwilling patients with potent drugs like LSD and mescaline in an attempt to find some kind of “truth serum.” Eventually renamed MK-ULTRA, the program was run strictly by Gottlieb, “America’s mind control czar.” The author engagingly examines various facets of this bizarre program, which led to LSD experimentation within the scientists’ social circles, resulting in instances of overdose and even suicide. After a decade of research into mind control, Gottlieb and his colleagues were forced to “face their cosmic failure.” Ultimately, readers will feel Kinzer’s frustration that Gottlieb, after a late-life conversion and being hauled back to Washington, D.C., for two rounds of Senate hearings, maintained his “victimization” and never truly had to answer for the crime of “laying waste to other people’s minds and bodies.”
A valiantly researched study that resurrects a troubling episode in American history.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-14043-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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