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 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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