Intelligence veteran Newman (History/Univ. of Maryland; JFK and Vietnam, 1992) tackles Lee Harvey Oswald ``the file'' rather than ``the man.'' In this case ``the file'' refers to roughly 250,000 pages of documents from the CIA, FBI, DOD, Army, Navy, and the American Embassy in Moscow, recently released by the JFK Assassination Records Review Board. Newman's thesis after ploughing through this mountain of bumf: ``The CIA had a keen operational interest in Lee Harvey Oswald from the day he defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 until the day he was murdered in the basement of the Dallas Police Department.'' Newman bases his case on inferences that follow from paperwork discrepancies. For instance, he makes much of the fact that Oswald was one of 300 people whose mail was opened by the supersecret and illegal HT/LINGUAL program even before his CIA ``201'' file was opened. That is, he seems to have been of intense interest to the CIA before the first evidence of mild interest, normally indicated by the opening of a 201 file. There are intriguing things here, for instance, about the fact that as a former Marine radar operator Oswald possessed limited but potentially explosive information on the U-2 program when he defected. However, much of the book is a wearying trek along the paper trail. Newman has performed a gargantuan digestive task of turning 250,000 pages of documents into a narrative that is at least coherent, if unfocused, and at its best is impressively painstaking. However, at its worst, it seems like an odd and terrifying genetic cross between the Zapruder tape and Warhol's film of a man sleeping. Exhaustive, tedious, and diffuse, this study eschews sensationalism but threatens death by minutiae.
Pub Date: July 14, 1995
ISBN: 0-7867-0131-5
Page Count: 420
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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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