A frustrating mixture of incontrovertible facts and dubious speculation. Proceed with caution.
A nationally syndicated conservative columnist explores the extent and impact of the Soviet Union’s penetration of the United States government.
Referring to Franklin Roosevelt’s “one-man cabinet,” Gen. George C. Marshall once remarked that Harry “Hopkins’s job with the president was to represent the Russian interests. My job was to represent the American interests.” Notwithstanding the many possible alternative readings, West (The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization, 2008) takes this comment as further evidence for her dossier demonstrating that Hopkins was Stalin’s complicit errand boy. In this, as in many other instances, she goes too far, challenging conventional histories at almost every turn. But she also makes a number of valid, sufficiently provocative points. Not until the 1990s, with access to the Venona files and Soviet archives, have historians wholly appreciated the scope of Russian spying in this country from the time FDR formally recognized the Soviet Union in 1933. West matches these new revelations to previously known facts and wonders why we’ve neglected to fully adjust the historical record. Why are whistle-blowers of the era still reviled as redbaiters, informers and rats? How has the stench of totalitarian Marxism, every bit as noxious as its contemporaneous ideologies, Nazism and fascism, failed to fully register? With the aid, she insists, of a small army of occupiers in New Deal agencies, the Treasury, Agricultural and State departments, Stalin had his way with the U.S. government and caused enormous suffering. West blames our elected officials, establishment historians (especially for ignoring intelligence history), blinkered journalists and elites sympathetic to the collectivist agenda for suppressing evidence of what she terms a massive betrayal of our traditions and institutions.
A frustrating mixture of incontrovertible facts and dubious speculation. Proceed with caution.Pub Date: May 28, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-63078-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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