A satisfying historical whodunit, redolent with Cold War paranoia and tragedy.
Convincing argument that the 1968 sinking of the nuclear submarine USS Scorpion, long considered an accident, was the result of a Soviet attack.
Although not the first to level this accusation, Navy veteran and nuclear engineer Sewell and Tom Clancy stand-in Preisler (Tom Clancy’s Power Plays #1, 2004, etc.) make a compelling case, buttressed by research in Soviet archives and interviews with retired officers. Espionage plays a central role in the Scorpion disaster, thanks to traitorous John Walker. The authors recount the oft-told but still mind-boggling story of this junior officer at submarine communications headquarters who sold secrets to the USSR. (He would not be suspected for nearly two decades, until an angry ex-wife informed on him.) Soon after Walker enabled the Soviets to decipher coded American submarine communications, a Soviet missile sub on a still-unknown mission near Hawaii sank with all hands in February 1968. Two weeks later, a spy reported that a damaged U.S. submarine had arrived in Japan. Soviet files reveal and interviews confirm that high Soviet officials believed it had deliberately sunk their vessel, perhaps by ramming. In revenge, they torpedoed the Scorpion on May 27, killing 99 men. Blaming the Soviets would have exacerbated the Cold War, so the Navy’s official inquiry quickly dismissed that idea and the Navy spent its time investigating theories involving complex mechanical failures. The authors deliver an engrossing overview of American and Soviet submarine operations, including an unnerving number of encounters that could have ended in shooting. They provide capsule biographies of the Scorpion’s captain and many of its crew, their families and their friends. Serious readers may skim the fictional recreation of the sinking, but few will be able to resist the juicy details offered about this half-forgotten disaster and its aftermath, including the boasting of old Soviet admirals that they would have won World War III because they knew every move the U.S. Navy made.
A satisfying historical whodunit, redolent with Cold War paranoia and tragedy.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9798-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
HISTORY | MILITARY | UNITED STATES | WORLD
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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