An eye-opener and an excellent job of reporting and writing. The only drawback will be the dawning realization that as bad...
Or, the gang that couldn’t scam straight.
“ ‘Do I agree with the Iraq War?’ Diveroli asked Packouz and Podrizki one night as they passed a bong around….No. But am I happy about it? Absofuckinglutely. I hope Bush invades more countries, because it’s good for business.’ ” You’ve got to like a book that charges headlong in the same dopey spirit of its subject, but as the story turns serious, so does Lawson (Octopus: Sam Israel, the Secret Market, and Wall Street’s Wildest Con, 2012), whose writing for Rolling Stone is the basis of this book. The subject is three stoners from Miami who dealt a little pot on the beach, avoided work as much as possible, and seemed destined for a go-nowhere future until the more ambitious of them happened on a government website listing civilian contracts available to award. A few clicks of the mouse later, and they were arms dealers—and soon implicated in a shadowy world in which government officials didn’t want to know what was happening as long as our allies were being equipped with arms. Being criminal-minded but capitalistic as well as stoned, the trio decided to buy as low and sell as high as they could, turning over barely serviceable arms from former Soviet states to the Afghan army, among other customers. How things went south, as they were destined to once the trio got greedy and fell victim to avarice and betrayal, is the subject of Lawson’s rollicking yarn, which is oddly entertaining: mix up James Fallows’ sturdy but humorless reporting, 30-odd years ago, on the procurement shenanigans surrounding the M16 rifle with a solid dose of gonzo and a pile of coke, and you’ve got this book.
An eye-opener and an excellent job of reporting and writing. The only drawback will be the dawning realization that as bad as the three stoners were, the government is sanctioning far worse in its zeal for secrecy and deniability.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6759-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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