An edifying history that, given America’s current global diplomatic stance, is also timely and hopefully instructive to...
For 13 days in October 1962, during the hottest part of the Cold War, the fate of humanity was at stake.
During those two weeks, American U-2 spy planes flying above Cuba had discovered Soviet missile sites in an advanced stage of assembly. In this new history of the Cuban missile crisis, Sherman and Tougias (co-authors: The Finest Hours: The True Story of the Coast Guard's Most Daring Sea Rescue, 2009) sketch the swift development of the elegant U-2 commissioned by the CIA and highlight the signal courage and capability of its dedicated pilots. At the time, surveillance data showed that in less than two weeks, the Soviet nuclear missiles would be fully operational. President John F. Kennedy, keenly familiar with danger and death due to his service in World War II, prepared for World War III, ready to engage the Soviets in the Caribbean and destroy hundreds of targets in the Soviet Union. He assembled an advisory group that included, among many other significant figures, Allen Dulles, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Bobby Kennedy, and Curtis LeMay. There were also functionaries on both sides who might trigger war inadvertently or, if they were short-tempered, even deliberately. The authors have assembled a page-turning narrative of their deliberations using extracts from White House tapes as well as archival research and conversations with some of those involved. At the Kremlin, Nikita Khrushchev was troubled and inscrutable, while Kennedy was deliberative. Opting for a naval blockade, he kept all forces at full readiness. Only at the last hours did diplomacy prevail. Kennedy was able to recall the ships, the Army, the Marines on standby, and the bombers bearing nuclear weapons. Thinking of what a lesser commander in chief might have done, readers will shudder.
An edifying history that, given America’s current global diplomatic stance, is also timely and hopefully instructive to those faced with similarly dire circumstances.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61039-804-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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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