Publication of this book got Geraghty arrested in 1998 for violating England's Official Secrets Act, though the Crown later...
An angry, obsessive analysis of the Anglo-Irish conflict that throws the Good Friday Peace Accords into doubt and condemns Irish extremists (rather than the British) for perpetuating a disorganized, politically naive terrorist war whose victims have been mostly innocent civilians.
Don't call the killings, bombings, and riots in Northern Ireland mere `Troubles,` warns journalist Geraghty (Who Dares Wins, not reviewed). Born on English soil to Irish parents, Geraghty began covering Northern Ireland for London’s Sunday Times in 1969. To him, the current peace has not closed the door to isolated, reactive incidents, but is a mere phase in a continuous `Irish War` that began in 1691, when `amateur warriors . . . refined terrorism into an art form.` He makes his case in four sections that brim with anguish at so much senseless suffering, beginning with is a recap of the political-religious violence and intrigue from 1969 to 1998 that asserts, among other things, that the IRA stage-managed several violent incidents in Belfast to demonize the British and encourage American financial support. This is followed with an insider's look at 30 years of British strategies that have thwarted some—but far from all—IRA and Ulster Defense Army terrorism; an outsider's appraisal of the IRA homemade weapons industry; and an expose of the collusion between the Royal Ulster Constabulary (the heavy-handed Northern Ireland police force) and Protestant terrorists. Geraghty concludes with a hasty but thorough overview from 1691 to the present that (while acknowledging murderously cruel British oppression) identifies a distinctively Irish `physical force tradition` that has little to do with contemporary religious affiliation or political goals.
Publication of this book got Geraghty arrested in 1998 for violating England's Official Secrets Act, though the Crown later dropped its charges (and with good reason: the few British tricks revealed herein pale beside a devastating accusation of IRA inhumanity to the Irish). (20 b&w photos, maps, illustrations)Pub Date: May 18, 2000
ISBN: 0-8018-6456-9
Page Count: 444
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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