An entertaining work duly informed by Duffy’s knowledge of both the war and New York City.
A sympathetic portrait of a reluctant, little-known German-American double agent on the eve of World War II.
There are several spy rings that overlap and converge in journalist Duffy’s (The Killing of Major Denis Mahon: A Mystery of Old Ireland, 2007, etc.) immensely readable account, all involving the German immigrant’s notion of “patriotism.” For many of the select machinists who worked at the Carl L. Norden production facility at 80 Lafayette St. in lower Manhattan, being a good German meant delivering blueprints of the top-secret “bombsight” mechanism to the Abwehr to improve the Luftwaffe’s bombing accuracy and thus “save millions and lots of time.” Many immigrant laborers were virulently anti-communist and members of the right-wing German American Bund, which paraded openly its support of National Socialism through the streets of the German neighborhood of Yorkville at a time before the FBI, and its emergent director J. Edgar Hoover, had declared the group an internal threat. Yet the other kind of patriotism involved loyalty to one’s adopted country, personified by William G. Sebold (1899-1970), who fled the political chaos of Germany in the 1920s and became a naturalized American citizen in 1936. By an extraordinarily unlucky turn of events, when he returned to Germany to visit his mother at the outbreak of war, he was roped into working for the Abwehr in order to get back to the United States. Unbeknownst to the Nazis, he had also contacted the FBI; among the German immigrant community of Yorkville and the Brooklyn Sperry Gyroscope Company, they uncovered a whole nest of subversives offering defense secrets to the Nazis. Sebold ultimately helped to convict 33 traitors in 1941 in what was known as the Duquesne Spy Ring—the first feather in Hoover’s hat. While colorful personalities proliferate throughout the narrative, the understated character of Sebold gleams.
An entertaining work duly informed by Duffy’s knowledge of both the war and New York City.Pub Date: July 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6795-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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