Rigorous reporting reveals “America’s role in the deliberate violation of democracy” in newly independent African nations.
A deeply distressing history of CIA involvement in plots to eliminate certain regimes in Africa, particularly in the Congo and Ghana, just as the countries shook off European colonial rule in the mid-20th century.
Between the independence of Ghana in 1957 and the CIA–backed overthrow of President Kwame Nkrumah in 1966, the CIA made an intense, rapid infiltration into Africa. Though not well known to lay readers, this history comes vividly to life in the capable hands of Williams, the author of Spies in the Congo (2016), among other investigative works. Despite being democratically elected, the popular leaders Nkrumah of Ghana and Patrice Lumumba of Congo were vilified by U.S. officials, who were nervous about (fabricated) overtures to the Soviet Union. Ostensibly for reasons of national security during the Cold War—and to keep precious uranium and other minerals within American control—the CIA operatives swung into action, at President Dwight Eisenhower’s behest, orchestrating the 1960 coup d’etat in Congo, led by Chief of Staff Joseph Mobutu, which resulted in Lumumba’s assassination. Through interviews and meticulous archival research, Williams exposes the extent of CIA agents’ involvement, both American and African, delivering a consistently authoritative and astute narrative. She also shows the collaboration of businessmen such as Maurice Tempelsman, who had massive financial interests in Africa. These operations were not only dubious, but expensive. In fact, they “ranked as the largest covert operation in the agency’s history, costing an estimated $90-$150 million in current dollars,” and many were undertaken by so-called cultural organizations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, “a CIA front with an Africa programme based in Paris and with fingers in most parts of the world.” While the Senate’s 1975 Church Committee investigation into the Lumumba affair was rightly hailed as a major breakthrough in accountability, Williams emphasizes that the results are inconclusive due to missing documents and ongoing secrecy.
Rigorous reporting reveals “America’s role in the deliberate violation of democracy” in newly independent African nations.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5417-6829-1
Page Count: 672
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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