Goltz’s worm’s-eye view of the work of gathering news in a war zone will intrigue students of journalism and the media, as...
A blood-soaked tale drawn from yesterday’s headlines—but news stories that too few Westerners ever bothered to read.
“If I ever get killed covering killing,” writes world-roving TV stringer Goltz, “I would like to state right now that the only person more foolish than me for getting into such a situation would be anyone who would describe my having done so as courageous.” Yet that’s the business of war-and-mayhem junkies such as Goltz, and he lives up to the foolishness, almost getting terminated here for working a tripod-mounted camera that looked just like a recoilless rifle, almost buying it there for having crossed the path of the wrong bunch of Russian commandos. He also sets objectivity by the door early on, and it’s clear that his sympathies lie with the Chechen rebels who throughout the 1990s resisted the invitation of the new Russian Federation to remain part of the team, a status Chechens had been busy declining for hundreds of years. The recent (and ongoing) conflict, Goltz writes, can be seen as “merely the most recent attempt by Moscow, repeated approximately every 50 years, to eradicate the Chechens from the face of the earth”—a view he doesn’t necessarily hold himself, but one widely shared by the Chechens, even those who signed up with Al Qaeda to fight Americans instead of their hated Russian foes. Goltz wanders in and out of savage battle scenes and vicious massacres, camera in hand, looking for the big story that will finally put Chechnya at least somewhere in the consciousness of news producers back home; and he finds it in a little village called Samashki, “the place of the deer,” soon to become the site of a bloodbath that even Moscow television would equate with “Lidice, Khatyn, and Son My.”
Goltz’s worm’s-eye view of the work of gathering news in a war zone will intrigue students of journalism and the media, as well as those who follow wars in remote corners of the planet.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-26874-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
