An engaging update to Allen Dulles’s Craft of Intelligence.
Just who came up with the idea to dust Fidel Castro with a chemical that would burn off his beloved beard? Turner, retired spook-in-chief, knows—and if he’s not telling all, he’s telling lots.
Turner served as director of national intelligence—not just of the CIA, but of “the fifteen agencies that comprise the Intelligence Community” under the benighted Carter administration. In this cleared-by-CIA account of how the modern U.S. intelligence apparatus came about, he is refreshingly open in admitting failures, along with successes. He opens with an unorthodox look at canonical founder William “Wild Bill” Donovan. Intelligence had hitherto been the province of the military and a few club-like organizations of private citizens, such as one “that met in New York to discuss gossip in the guise of foreign intelligence, aided by heavy drinking.” Donovan helped organize and professionalize the service; Franklin Roosevelt, in turn, kept Donovan in the dark about information he had received from other intelligence sources and, in the end, kept the OSS under military control rather than create a strong Cabinet-level director of intelligence, at least in part, Turner guesses, because “there was strong opposition from the military (something that has never abated).” The author recounts a decidedly checkered history as subsequent intelligence directors tried to coordinate their activities with the agenda of chief executives—which has a surprisingly personal dimension, for the CIA head who wins is the one whom the president likes, and such individuals are rare indeed. Along the way, Turner drops anecdotes about Castro’s beard (the proposed assault on which was the brainchild of spy novelist Ian Fleming), the little-known but successful rescue of six Americans during the Iranian hostage crisis, the military’s jealousy when the CIA developed neat toys and the character of certain directors such as Reagan advisor William Casey, who “serves as a warning of what can happen if the DCI is given too much power.”
An engaging update to Allen Dulles’s Craft of Intelligence.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7868-6782-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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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