Taut and well-crafted—of great interest to students of spydom and the early Cold War.
“Both died without making any confessions”: a finely detailed study of crime and punishment in the days of the Manhattan project.
It was an unlikely pairing: a geeky linguist and codebreaker working for an early iteration of the National Security Agency just after World War II and an earnest FBI agent who teamed up to search out evidence of Soviet espionage inside the atomic bomb program. At the end of that trail lay the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and the capture of Klaus Fuchs, but success in breaking up the spy ring and ferreting out the mole deep inside the organization was not without episodes of ineptitude and ball-dropping: “then, without either warning or explanation, two months after the Blue Problem had been launched, it was ended,” writes veteran historian of spookdom Blum (The Last Goodnight: A World War II Story of Espionage, Adventure, and Betrayal, 2016, etc.), a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Getting to that mole was one thing; doing so without tipping the Soviets off to the fact that their codes had been broken was quite another. The author’s story, which grows to enfold the Venona program, isn’t entirely new, but it reinforces several points: how thoroughly Soviet agents were able to penetrate the government and scientific circles and the undeniable guilt of those who were eventually brought to justice—and, to boot, the ordinariness of some of the key players (“when Spillane arrived punctually at two, Kalibre, along with his pregnant wife—the woman code-named Wasp—sat with him at the kitchen table”). Blum is especially good on the motivations that caused some Americans to take the Soviet side. One explained that he felt that the American government committed “gross negligence” in not sharing atomic secrets with its recent ally, while Julius Rosenberg’s haughty arrogance may lose him any sympathy readers might have had before opening the book.
Taut and well-crafted—of great interest to students of spydom and the early Cold War.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-245824-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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