Highly readable, and most illuminating. Here’s looking forward to Geraldo’s retort.
Batten down the hatches: here comes a rising flood of memoirs, celebrity and otherwise, about the recent unpleasantness in Iraq.
Thankfully, longtime NPR reporter Garrels’s account is much like her on-air persona: professional but personable, full of human touches and offhand wisdom. Arriving in Baghdad in the fall of 2002, she gives full notice of the humanity of those who would soon be falling under American bombs, though with no sympathy whatever for the monstrous Hussein regime—about which she offers some intriguing side notes. “Baghdad,” she writes, “is not a charming place. The cement buildings are spare, solid, and utilitarian . . . and there is virtually nothing left to hint at the city’s exotic past.” (And that was before the bombing.) Yet she finds the Baghdadi people to be, in the main, friendly and solicitous—especially the women, who, she notes, enjoyed far more freedom under Saddam’s rule than do their counterparts in most other Arab countries. “Being an older woman has its advantages,” she writes. “I would never have been able to interview a mullah along the Pakistan-Afghan border were he not assured in advance that I was an ‘old woman.’ ” Though of solid years, Garrels performs just fine during the days of shock and awe, a time of considerable worry to her husband, whose lengthy e-mails from home punctuate Garrels’s account. (Sometimes they are charming, but mostly they are annoying interruptions for readers eager to get on with the story.) Along the way, Garrels writes of the difficulty of reporting on what no one knows (the whereabouts of Saddam, the effectiveness of the bombing); gets off some nice zingers about rock-star reporter Geraldo Rivera, whose alleged horse’s-ass qualities she richly affirms; gives a voice to Iraqi views that Saddam brought his woes on his own head; and roundly criticizes the Bush administration for its failure to win the peace—and apparent lack of interest in doing so.
Highly readable, and most illuminating. Here’s looking forward to Geraldo’s retort.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-52903-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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 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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