A tirelessly researched investigation, this work unravels many strands to be taken up for subsequent exploration.
An intriguing, densely packed, somewhat murky journalistic exposé of disgruntled Muslims who fled Soviet Russia and were politically manipulated over the decades by dubious Western elements.
Pulitzer Prize–winning Wall Street Journal reporter Johnson (Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China, 2004) was surprised to learn that the Islamic Center in Munich held such a prominent place in the Muslim world. He soon discovered that the mosque had been built and financed by a unique group of émigré Muslims and refugees in West Germany who had troubling ties to Nazi Germany and the CIA. The story begins on the battlefields of Russia during World War II, when the Nazis captured minority Russian soldiers—Georgians, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, etc.—and recognized that their oppression by, and hatred of, the Soviets could render them valuable tools for the Nazis. These soldiers were employed in the Ostministerium, an administrative arm of the Wehrmacht charged with managing the newly conquered East European territories. Johnson pursues one of the key administrators, Gerhard von Mende, a Turkic studies expert whose work in the Ostministerium, including the wooing of the notoriously anti-Semitic Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, nicely dovetailed with his postwar Cold War intelligence work for the West Germans. The author also examines Robert Dreher, a CIA agent working for the American Committee Liberation from Bolshevism (“Amcomlib”), which mostly ran Radio Liberty and kept close watch on von Mende’s activities and agents. Plans to build a mosque in Munich in 1960 as a place of political activity brought together these disparate elements. It also offered a meeting place for the Muslim Brotherhood, a grassroots Islamist organization founded in 1928 with questionable ties to terrorists yet embraced by the United States and others.
A tirelessly researched investigation, this work unravels many strands to be taken up for subsequent exploration.Pub Date: May 4, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-15-101418-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
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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