A wearying journey through the spy agency's history that fails to take itself sufficiently seriously.
A history of the CIA told through an examination of the careers of its directors and other key figures.
National Security Archive senior fellow Prados (Storm over Leyte: The Philippine Invasion and the Destruction of the Japanese Navy, 2016, etc.) has written about the CIA in many books and articles, including Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (2006). Here, he sets out to describe "how the agency, over seven decades, has resisted—and finally decoupled itself from—government accountability." The author proceeds to lay out extensively detailed accounts of well-known agency disasters, from its inception through the Bay of Pigs to the "black sites" of the Iraq War and the subsequent attempts to cover them up or obscure blame. Unfortunately, he makes little effort to show how all this detail contributes to his thesis. Showers of facts cascade down, directors and "barons" come and go, covert ops succeed or fail, the agency is reorganized yet again, congressional and internal investigating committees compile reports that are released or suppressed—too much of the information has little obvious relevance to the author's asserted theme. Instead of taking a chronological approach, Prados groups the spymasters by what he considers their character types, resulting in considerable overlap in the presentation and a constantly shifting time frame that becomes difficult to follow. Further, the author presents the narrative in a loose, frivolous style poorly suited to what he would present as a very serious subject. The author’s subjects are confusingly referenced by last name, first name, or nickname, according to his whim, agents are "spooks" and lawyers are "gunslingers," and idiom and sometimes-baffling metaphor substitute for carefully articulated assertions. Ultimately, Prados’ prime contention remains unproven, not for lack of facts but for lack of incisive argument tying them together.
A wearying journey through the spy agency's history that fails to take itself sufficiently seriously.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62097-088-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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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