A fascinating work enriched by the author’s deep knowledge and command of his material.
An in-depth look at the intriguing dark days at the break of World War II, when fear of a “Fifth Column” was rampant.
Sifting through a cache of archives at Boston University, where Rand teaches journalism, the author became aware of the hushed-up story of a low-level American embassy employee in London who had been arrested in May 1940 by British MI5 for squirreling away compromising missives between the top U.S. and British leaders. Tyler Kent, then a code clerk in the American embassy and formerly part of the first U.S. embassy team put in place by William Bullitt in Moscow, was a strangely disgruntled young man who deeply sympathized with growing reactionary elements, like pro-German, pro-isolationist, anti-Semitic views then vying with more interventionist segments both in England and in the U.S. In fact, Kent had been flirting with (and providing documents to) members of the Right Club in London, led by a destabilized, intensely anti-Semitic Member of Parliament, Archibald Ramsay, convinced of the pernicious “Jewish menace” trying to ruin the government; and another dangerous member, Russian Baroness Anna Wolkoff, who was actually providing said documents to the notorious William Joyce, making his incendiary broadcasts in Berlin. Although Kent had been under surveillance for some months, the defeat of British naval forces in Norway intensified the “Fifth Column Panic” then sweeping the government, and Kent was apprehended, stripped of diplomatic immunity, quietly tried and imprisoned for the duration of the war. The damning documents found in Kent’s possession would have revealed Roosevelt’s and others’ attempts to circumvent the Neutrality Act, which Kent intended to reveal to U.S. senators.
A fascinating work enriched by the author’s deep knowledge and command of his material.Pub Date: June 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7627-8696-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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