Another winner from Mundy, who tells a story that deserves to be told about women who deserve to be remembered.
With painstaking research, an award-winning journalist reveals the crucial roles undertaken by women in the intelligence arena.
The Cold War and, later, the war on terror were conflicts fought in the shadows, a deadly game meant to prevent large-scale conflict. However, there was another battle conducted within the CIA: the struggle of women within the organization who had to fight sexism and discrimination to have their voices heard. Mundy covered related ground in her acclaimed 2017 book, Code Girls, but this book features a much larger canvas. The story spans seven decades, from the establishment of the CIA to the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Many highly qualified women applied to serve in the fledgling CIA, but those who made it through the grueling selection process usually found themselves shunted into typing and filing jobs. There was a culture of toxic masculinity in the organization, and women were often seen as little more than objects. Nevertheless, some managed to work their ways into field operations. They proved to be remarkably good at the tradecraft of spying, but there was little recognition from superiors. At the same time, women were doing critical tasks in intelligence analysis, and this group stepped into a new role when the threat of terrorism emerged. It required interpreting scraps of information, from financial transactions to the movement of dangerous radicals. Few people in the senior echelons of the CIA, however, were interested in their reports on Islamic militants. After 9/11, there were attempts to elbow the women out of the picture, but they managed to continue their work, eventually tracking down bin Laden. Mundy is able to keep the sprawling narrative and huge cast on track, drawing on interviews and declassified records. The result is a vivid, compelling, and important book.
Another winner from Mundy, who tells a story that deserves to be told about women who deserve to be remembered.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780593238172
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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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