Collusion? The Trump administration, by Harding’s account, is soaking in it. Stay tuned.
Guardian foreign correspondent Harding (The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man, 2014, etc.) offers a sneak peek at details of the “Steele dossier” that have yet to unfold—and the evidence is damning indeed.
Apart from his well-known work documenting Edward Snowden’s exposé of American intelligence, the author has logged considerable time as a reporter inside Russia. It was there that he gained firsthand information about the ways of the Putin kleptocracy that lends credence to reports proffered by British intelligence analyst Christopher Steele, who in turn has extensively documented contacts with members of the team working with Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, many of them subsequently placed inside the administration. Harding makes no bones of characterizing this as collusion, as the title of his book proclaims, and the crime committed by that collusion as treason, even if “vehemently denied, contested, and in certain key respects unprovable.” Some of those respects have since gained a broader airing with the arraignments of Paul Manafort and Carter Page, though many key players on the Russian side will be far from household names. Harding is at his best connecting dots that may not always be obvious, including Trump’s long history of business dealings with Russia and alleged connections to organized crime (“Trump’s links to the underworld were multifarious”), dealings that were often unsuccessful enough to force him into borrowing money from shady figures and cutting deals that may land him in prison before it’s all over. Among the most intriguing of the threads are Trump’s astoundingly checkered relations with a German banking giant that continued to lend him money even as the worst of credit risks—and that at the same time was laundering Russian money, “not small amounts but many billions of dollars.” If readers emerge from this fast-paced narrative convinced that the Trump White House is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Russian oligarchs, then there’s good reason for it.
Collusion? The Trump administration, by Harding’s account, is soaking in it. Stay tuned.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-525-56251-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 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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