An intriguing, bracing tale, and not just for history buffs.
Before 9/11 there was July 30, 1916.
On that day, German saboteurs lit up the skies around New York Harbor with a massive explosion at the Black Tom munitions depot in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty near what is now Liberty State Park. The fiery detonation, which could be felt as far away as Maryland, blew out the windows of lower Manhattan buildings as far north as the main New York Public Library branch on 42nd Street. It was the most spectacular (though far from the only) act of sabotage carried out by Germany's well-placed network of spies and bombmakers, determined to halt the shipment of ammunition from the still-“neutral” United States to its World War I Allies in Europe. Millman (Pickup Artists: Street Basketball in America, 1998), a career sportswriter, deftly narrates the story of the brazen German agents who planned the sabotage, then turns to the exhausting legal battle that ensued to get Germany to admit its guilt and pay for the damage. The effort wouldn't end until Hitler was in power and the Second World War had begun. Initially, the Black Tom explosion was branded an accident, and none of the German saboteurs was ever arrested for the crime. It wasn't until 1924 that the Lehigh Valley Railroad, which owned Black Tom, brought suit against Germany before the Mixed Claims Commission, a legal entity created to hear claims against Germany following the war. The exhausting legal case would consume the lives of both American and German lawyers, locked in a struggle to uncover or suppress the truth about Germany's role. In a clear, cogent narrative, Millman does a good job of navigating the complex issues and behind-the-scenes politics that fueled this marathon legal battle. He also proves adept at fleshing out the human stories of the main characters involved. Those include John McCloy, who risked his legal career to take on the case; John Larkin, a fiery Irish labor leader whose 11th-hour revelations proved crucial; and Fred Herrmann, an American citizen turned German spy who was tracked to Chile and talked into confessing his role.
An intriguing, bracing tale, and not just for history buffs.Pub Date: July 12, 2006
ISBN: 0-316-73496-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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