An important story with broad ramifications.
According to veteran New York Times reporter and foreign correspondent DePalma (The Man Who Invented Fidel: Castro, Cuba, and Herbert L. Matthews of the New York Times, 2006, etc.), in the aftermath of 9/11, even those “most experienced at rescue” made decisions that had tragic consequences.
The author, a member of the team that wrote the Pulitzer Prize–winning series “Portraits of Grief,” looks at the damage inflicted by the failure to adequately protect firefighters, police, construction workers and others in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center. He rejects any suggestion that there was a conspiracy by the Bush administration or New York City officials “to put profit ahead of people’s health” or “to hide the enormity of what happened.” However, he believes that a series of decisions, while neither outright subterfuge nor deliberate distortion of the facts, underestimated the danger from the toxic dust that covered the area of the explosion and buildings in the immediate neighborhood, needlessly exposing people to unnecessary health risks. “Some made in haste, some made with arrogance,” these decisions “favored the recovery of the city over the recovery of its people,” even though health-department and EPA officials, as well as firefighters, recognized that the dust was in all likelihood extremely toxic. Respirators were made available on-site, but they were unwieldy; rescue workers were not encouraged to wear them, and they worked long hours without medical supervision. The heroic frenzy of the original rescue effort was extended to the clean-up without regard to workers’ safety. Front-page headlines that exposed the dangers were disputed by the mayor, though they later proved to be accurate. A follow-up study of ground-zero workers released in 2006 estimated that seven out of ten suffered from “severe respiratory problems that persisted far longer than expected,” and limited studies indicate higher-than-expected mortality among that population.
An important story with broad ramifications.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-13-138566-5
Page Count: 330
Publisher: FT Press/Pearson
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
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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