A well-reported, smoothly written book for anyone who wants to understand contemporary American military might and the...
Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times national security correspondent Mazzetti demonstrates in horrifying, persuasive detail how the new-style warfare approved by both George W. Bush and Barack Obama has led to controversial assassinations by the U.S. government and blowback yielding new terrorists determined to harm American citizens.
The author pulls together the strands from the White House, CIA and Department of Defense, operating especially in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia to explain how the CIA shifted from a usually nonlethal spy agency to a "killing machine, an organization consumed with man hunting." At the same time, the DOD, which has traditionally run the combat wars, has assumed numerous other spying activities. Although the complete cast of characters is understandably numerous, Mazzetti focuses primarily on 20 warriors at the CIA, 10 at the DOD, two attached to the White House (including John Brennan, recently nominated by Obama as the new CIA director), 13 in Pakistan, six in Somalia and four in Yemen. Using wisely selected narratives within the big picture, Mazzetti juggles all those characters skillfully, opening the book, for example, with the capture of an American spy named Raymond Davis within Pakistan after a lethal roadway incident in the city of Lahore. Davis was a private contractor hired by the CIA to infiltrate Pakistan. His arrest by the Pakistanis took an especially ugly turn after American officials, including President Obama, lied to their allies about Davis' mission. Mazzetti includes plenty of context about the run-up to the new ways of American warfare by recounting the circumstances surrounding 9/11, as well as U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. However, since those sagas have been told so often at book length, Mazzetti wisely provides little-known coverage of the campaigns in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.
A well-reported, smoothly written book for anyone who wants to understand contemporary American military might and the widespread hatred for the U.S. that has been the result.Pub Date: April 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59420-480-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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 Yorkerstaff 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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