Hoffman possesses a solid command of his material and conveys the secretive nature of espionage agencies with a novelist’s...
Suspenseful cloak-and-dagger reenactment of the FBI sting that exposed a Chinese-American double agent in 1985.
When the case of Larry Wu-tai Chin broke, revealing that the retired CIA employee had passed reams of documents to the People’s Republic of China over the course of more than 11 years, it came at a humiliating time for the Agency, writes Canadian author Hoffman (Le Carré’s Landscape, 2001, etc.). The so-called Year of the Spy found an unprecedented number of turncoats like John Walker and Jonathan Jay Pollard bleeding secrets to foreign governments. Chin’s treachery was first detected by an anonymous source codenamed Planesman; Hoffman “connects the dots” and links Planesman to a protégé of Kang Sheng, the notorious head of China’s secret services. During an extended interview conducted by three FBI agents at his apartment on November 22, 1985, Chin spilled his secrets. Born in 1922 in Beijing, he found that learning English was his ticket to ingratiating himself with the Americans during the turbulent communist revolution and beyond. The Cold War atmosphere of mutual distrust and paranoia allowed Chin to enjoy American protection on the one hand, living the high life in California and Virginia with his second wife, while passing documents to the Chinese via a handler in Hong Kong and Canada on the other. As Mao Zedong and President Nixon moved toward their historic rapprochement in 1971, both sides needed confirmation of the other’s intentions. “China trusted Nixon’s motives based on the information Chin passed them,” one agent commented. However, despite Chin’s claim to have acted only for the advancement of Sino-American relations, he also got rich in the process and was convicted in 1986 on 17 counts, including conspiracy and filing false tax returns. He committed suicide in prison shortly thereafter.
Hoffman possesses a solid command of his material and conveys the secretive nature of espionage agencies with a novelist’s panache.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-58642-148-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
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 Yorker staff 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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