Fans of Fleming and Furst will delight in this skillfully related true-fact side of the story.
Franklin. Ben Franklin, superspy. This scholarly but readable history unlocks a portfolio of secrets—supersecrets, even.
It seems fitting that Andrew (Modern and Contemporary History/Univ. of Cambridge; Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, 2010, etc.) spent his academic career at Cambridge given how many spies that august institution fielded in the Cold War. This doorstopping survey begins at the beginning, with the Aristotelean justification for espionage: “Since people also revolt because of their private lives,” reads Politics, “it is necessary to set up some magistracy…to inspect those who live in a manner deleterious to the constitution.” The narrative continues to the present and projects into the future, darkly warning that since all human inventions now tend to proliferate globally, it will only be a matter of time before state-level weapons of mass destruction are used against civilians in the West, at a much deadlier scale than 9/11 and other catastrophes. “Though good intelligence diminishes surprise,” writes the author, “it cannot prevent it.” On that note, he suggests, good intelligence has been harder to come by than in the glory days of the Cold War. He observes that if we had Cold War–quality intelligence on Saddam Hussein, as the West did on the Soviet Union, then the Iraq War, based on the flawed premise of hidden weapons of mass destruction, would likely never have taken place. In between, Andrew takes a deep, sometimes breathless look at such things as conspiracy theories in early-19th-century Germany, the Enigma codebreakers of Bletchley Park and Winston Churchill’s steadfast support of their costly operation, the role of spying in the American Revolution, and the Israeli intelligence service’s rather flamboyant mastery of assassination. Failures of intelligence, notably 9/11 but also the Chinese infiltration of Richard Nixon’s 1972 mission to Beijing, figure as much as successes in Andrew’s spry account.
Fans of Fleming and Furst will delight in this skillfully related true-fact side of the story.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-300-23844-0
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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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