An intriguing history that holds relevance to domestic terrorism in our current era.
A terrorism expert recounts the actions of a group “unlike any other American terrorist group,” one “created and led by women.”
Rosenau (US Internal Security Assistance to South Vietnam, 2005, etc.), a senior research scientist at RAND who also served as a counterterrorism expert at the State Department, traces the seven-year run (1978-1985) of the May 19th Communist Organization (M19), a group of (mostly) women who banded together to oppose U.S. government policies of domestic oppression and international imperialism. Because these individuals—not “automata, relics, or spooks but agents of history willing to sacrifice everything to transform the world”—often relied on weapons to accomplish their goals, the author terms their activities “terrorism,” but he uses the term “violent extremism” interchangeably. Rosenau begins by introducing the original brain trust, Judith Clark (b. 1949) and Susan Rosenberg (b. 1955). Later, the narrative takes on further complexity as the cast of characters and related revolutionary groups expands. The author eventually focuses on six additional women, as well as two men, as the linchpins of M19. All of them used one or more aliases hoping to avoid capture by law enforcement agencies; the welter of names can feel difficult to track, though the list of members and associates helps. Then Rosenau introduces “The Family,” an associate group. Their names, plus their aliases, as well as their intermingling with M19 further complicate the narrative. Nonetheless, the author relies on skilled, detailed research to outline both the goals and violent practices of the revolutionaries. The titular bombing of the U.S. Capitol occurred on Nov. 7, 1983; less than a year later, M19 also bombed the South African consulate in New York City. Various bank robberies receive attention, some of which resulted in serious injuries or death. Most of the revolutionaries introduced end up apprehended and imprisoned, and Rosenau concludes that “the far-left terrorist project that began with the Weathermen in 1969…and continued…with May 19th ended in abject failure.”
An intriguing history that holds relevance to domestic terrorism in our current era.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7012-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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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