Fluid, sharp writing, deep research, and a spy network with unparalleled ingenuity provide a snappy read and lots of...
Hemming (Agent M: The Lives and Spies of MI5’s Maxwell Knight, 2017, etc.) tells the story of MI6 operative Bill Stephenson (the model for 007) and how crucial he was to America’s entry into World War II.
Stephenson was sent to New York in June 1940, to convince U.S. officials to support England in her desperate fight against the Germans. Later that summer, President Franklin Roosevelt sent Bill Donovan on an unofficial visit to London to discern if England could survive. Stephenson knew of the visit and had MI6 take charge, wooing Donovan with royal visits and access to high-security operations. When Donovan returned to America, Stephenson convinced him the U.S. needed a stronger spy service. Donovan’s job was to get Roosevelt onboard. He was already leaning in that direction, ready to help in any way he could—everything that is, short of declaring war. Helping these interventionists was an East Coast group with strong influence called the Century Group. American isolationists, led by Charles Lindbergh, were their fiercest opponents. Lindbergh, who addressed huge crowds at anti-war rallies and justified Nazi aggression due to economic imbalance, received information from Hans Thomsen, the senior diplomat at the German Embassy in charge of keeping the U.S. out of the war. Thomsen developed the congressional “franking privilege” scheme whereby pro-German material could be mailed to sympathizers by sitting members of Congress for free. He also bribed newspapers to publish his false material. Stephenson and Donovan built the most diverse and extensive yet subtle propaganda drive ever directed by one sovereign state at another. In this page-turning spy thriller, Hemming shows how they mastered the art of starting rumors, infiltrating groups, and manipulating opinion polls. They also used forgeries, organized protests, and wiretaps and hacked into private communications. Their only rule: No rules.
Fluid, sharp writing, deep research, and a spy network with unparalleled ingenuity provide a snappy read and lots of shockers.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5417-4214-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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
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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