Superficial, but entertaining and even useful for the watchful citizen.
A curiously goofy look at great deceptions in politics, war, history, books, newspapers and medicine.
Versatile author/editor Fawcett (It Seemed Like a Good Idea…: A Compendium of Great Historical Fiascoes, 2000, etc.) actually wrote only the prologue and epilogue to this teeming survey, and bylines under the chapter titles are all the credit he gives those who penned the rest. But the editor (or someone) does maintain a sprightly overall tone; entries are accessible rather than scholarly, even when mired in the details of mendacity-marathons like the Iran-Contra scandal. The juiciest section, “The First Casualty of War Is Truth,” encompasses the flimsy justifications invoked for America’s 1846 war with Mexico, the Nazis’ 1939 invasion of Poland and the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II, not to mention Lyndon Johnson’s endorsement of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem as “the Churchill of the decade.” Roman Emperor Constantine’s placement of Christmas in December—Jesus was probably born in the spring—makes a rich story, as does the Nazi fabrication of Teresienstadt as an ideal concentration camp for the visiting Red Cross delegates. Cleopatra, “the beauty of her age,” had a hooked nose and large, uneven teeth, we learn, and examples of authors falsely claiming to tell the truth run from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. Washington Post journalist Janet Cooke’s sad tale about an eight-year-old heroin addict won her a Pulitzer in 1980, though she had to give it back when she confessed to lying. Medical deceptions are particularly plentiful, such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study’s shameful hoodwinking of its poor, black subjects and the collusion between government and press to keep the public ignorant of just how crippled polio had left FDR. In closing, Fawcett chooses Joseph Stalin as the greatest liar in history and elucidates why.
Superficial, but entertaining and even useful for the watchful citizen.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-113050-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
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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