A thoughtful look at the shadow government, unlikely to win Colby or the CIA any new admirers.
Can America find it in its heart to love—or at least forgive—one of the architects of the Vietnam debacle and the Cold War?
National Security Archive researcher and espionage historian Prados (The Blood Road, 1998, etc.) hopes so, it would seem: though critical, his long, exhaustive account of William Colby’s 30-odd years as a CIA stalwart advances a well-reasoned defense of decisions and events that are now bywords for the indefensible. A notable example is Colby’s involvement in Operation Phoenix, the disastrous program to “Vietnamize” the Vietnam War by, among other things, transferring villagers into sealed hamlets to better hinder the comings and goings of Viet Cong agents. Operation Phoenix wasn’t his idea, states Prados, even though “Colby’s name has been linked to Phoenix ever since.” Exploring Colby’s views on the 1963 assassination of South Vietnamese president Diem, the outcome of a long series of CIA efforts to control his regime’s direction, the author notes that Colby opposed efforts to remove Diem and insisted long afterward that the US could have won the war with Diem still in office. Granted, Colby remained a faithful servant in the CIA’s program of inflated order-of-battle and body-count estimates and did his part to widen the war in Laos and Cambodia; he could have done nothing else, suggests Prados, who contends that Colby was made to fall on his sword as agency director largely because of widespread anti-CIA sentiment throughout the government and the nation in the wake of the war and Watergate. Supporters of Richard Helms may find fault with Prados’s review of Colby’s final days in office, but conspiracy buffs will find that his account of Colby’s suspicious death in 1996 offers plenty of intriguing possibilities.
A thoughtful look at the shadow government, unlikely to win Colby or the CIA any new admirers.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-19-512847-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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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