Perhaps inadvertently captures the folly and resource drain of the Iraq War, though its emphatic style should appeal to...
Blustery, angry account of three Navy SEALs who snared a vicious Iraqi terrorist and were then ensnared by flimsy allegations of prisoner abuse.
Writing “with the cooperation of” two of the accused, Robinson (co-author: Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10, etc.) sees this odd case as an indictment of the military's desire for political correctness and its complex relationship with its elite warriors: "The US Navy SEALs belonged to the nation, not to a few yellow-braided officers.” By 2009, the special-ops mission in Iraq was directed toward capture-or-kill missions against specific insurgents, like Ahmad al-Isawi, responsible for the notorious mutilation slayings of four American contractors in Fallujah. When the SEALs finally seized him, he accused one of bloodying his lip, a ploy literally out of the al-Qaida handbook. The fear of abuse scandals following Abu Ghraib caused commanders to lose perspective on the reality of how such counterterrorism operations were conducted. Unfortunately, the court martial of the SEALs became a public embarrassment for the military. The whole affair was carried all the way to Baghdad; after considerable expense, all three were quickly acquitted. Robinson ably discusses the intricacies of military justice, but his style is repetitive: Readers are constantly advised that “[t]he Navy had somehow jumped all over an unreliable statement from a stressed-out kid…acting as though a heroic SEAL platoon did not have an honest man among them.” Since the case against the SEALs seems like an update of Catch-22, Robinson's frequent assertions that each accused warrior "wore the flag of the United States both on his battle dress and on his heart" become extraneous.
Perhaps inadvertently captures the folly and resource drain of the Iraq War, though its emphatic style should appeal to conservative readers.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-306-82308-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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 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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