An invaluable look into another nation’s response to terrorism.
France’s “trial of the century.”
On November 13, 2015, Islamic State terrorists killed 130 people and wounded nearly 500 others in shootings and suicide bombings across Paris. Nine of the militants were killed in the attacks on “V13”—Friday (vendredi) the 13th. The trial of 20 men accused of involvement in the attacks began in September 2021 and lasted nine months. There to write about it was journalist and novelist Carrère, author of 97,196 Words: Essays and The Adversary: A True Story of a Monstrous Deception. Carrère is no legal specialist, but he tells an engrossing story of justice à la française; the book originally appeared as columns in the French magazine L’Obs. Readers will quickly notice that French trials are different. Unlike America’s “adversarial” legal system, the “inquisitorial” French system lacks dramatic courtroom confrontations. Instead, defense and prosecution, with the active participation of the judge, examine the facts of a case. Perhaps most startling, the crime’s victims (and their lawyers) are present and participate. This allows Carrère to describe—perhaps at more length than some readers would prefer—horrific experiences of those who were caught in the attacks or who discovered that someone they loved had been killed. Except for one defendant (whose explosive belt may have been defective), the others varied from jihadist fellow travelers to associates who may or may not have been entirely innocent. Readers learn details of how the attacks were planned (very sloppily), how they were carried out (with much confusion), and how the police reacted (with incompetence before the attacks and overreaction afterward). Mostly, Carrère offers a penetrating account of how France dealt with a mass murder. The trial was grueling, but it was necessary. As public prosecutor Camille Hennetier says of the verdict in her closing remarks: “It will not heal the wounds, be they visible or invisible. It will not bring the dead back to life. But it can at least reassure the living that here law and justice have the last word.”
An invaluable look into another nation’s response to terrorism.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780374615703
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
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
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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