Based on interviews with nearly everyone involved (except the Iranians): a competent, not-too-novelized reconstruction of Texas entrepreneur Ross Perot's efforts to engineer the rescue of two unfairly jailed executives in Tehran. . . just as the Shah's regime was collapsing in 1979. Perot's company is ESD, a Dallas-based computer-tech firm—hired by Iran to organize its new social-security system. Circa December 1978, however, the Iranian government had gotten millions behind in its bills. Was it just coincidence, then, that the two top ESD execs in Tehran were arrested, with bail put at a ludicrous $13 million? Perot, back in Texas, expected the execs to be released after a little pressure; but not even Secretary Kissinger could get a response. (And the State Dept. refused to treat the case as kidnapping.) So Perot, "whose role in life was to rescue others," started planning a private (illegal) jailbreak mission—headed by ex-Colonel Bull Simons (who headed a Perot-funded Vietnam-POW rescue try), staffed by ESD exec/volunteers with G.I. backgrounds. ("Perot was just so proud of them.") They planned, rehearsed, trained meticulously. Unfortunately, however, they got to Tehran just in time to see the ESD prisoners moved to a different prison, this one an "impregnable fortress." Though the Shah's regime was crumbling, the demonic official behind the ESD jailing remained firm; bail negotiations continued, fruitlessly. But, eventually, as anti-Shah riots spread, it became clear that a mob would soon storm the prison—so, in the book's least credible chapter, an Iranian ESD-trainee named Rashid impetuously triggers the storming of the jail ("Rashid had become a revolutionary leader. Nothing was impossible"). The execs escape, manage to join the ESD forces at an American hotel. And, after this rather anti-climactic turning-point, the book moves into its only really suspenseful chapters: the journey of the ESD team, guided by Rashid, through Revolution-torn Iran towards the Turkish border: and only after further hassles in Turkey and Germany do all the ESD people finally get. . . home free. Clearly determined to glorify Perot & Co., Follett doesn't go in for much textured characterization. Especially when it comes to the exploits of Rashid (who escaped with the Americans), he may have fallen for a tall-tale or two. And his prose, increasingly sloppy in recent novels, is at best rudimentary here. Still, for readers partial to macho sentiment, gung-ho theatrics, and can-do philosophy, this is solidly diverting action-entertainment—with the byline (if not the shapely melodrama) of a proven best-seller.
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 1983
ISBN: 0451213092
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1983
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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