Zuckoff did not set out to write a feel-good book, and the subject matter is unquestionably depressing at times....
A meticulously delineated, detailed, graphic history of the events of 9/11 in New York City, at the Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania.
Working at the Boston Globe as an investigative journalist, Zuckoff (Journalism/Boston Univ.; 13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened In Benghazi, 2014, etc.) spent months after 9/11 publishing pieces on the tragedy’s victims and their families and friends. He decided to revisit the personal sagas so that future generations of readers will fully understand this watershed moment in American history. The author divides the book into three sections: what happened inside the cabins and cockpits of the four hijacked planes; what happened on the ground at the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania countryside; and reports on what happened to some of the survivors after 9/11. Zuckoff mostly avoids references to the hijackers’ possible motivations as well as speculation on why the government failed to halt the sometimes-amateurish terrorist plot despite multiple warnings from alert sources. The author also eschews lengthy commentary on the massive reduction in civil liberties in the U.S. as governments at all levels implemented drastic policies to halt future terrorist attacks. In each of the three sections, Zuckoff offers a cross-section of widely representative individuals and then builds the relentlessly compelling narrative around those real-life protagonists. Despite the story’s sprawling cast, which could have sabotaged a book by a less-skilled author, Zuckoff ably handles all of the complexities. Even readers who might normally balk at reliving 9/11 and its aftermath are quite likely to find the accounts of gruesome deaths, seemingly miraculous survivals, and courageous first responders difficult to set aside for an emotional break. In two appendices, the author provides a “timeline of key events” and a list of “the nearly three thousand names as they appear inscribed in bronze on the 9/11 Memorial in New York.”
Zuckoff did not set out to write a feel-good book, and the subject matter is unquestionably depressing at times. Nonetheless, as contemporary history, Fall and Rise is a clear and moving success.Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-227564-6
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | GENERAL HISTORY
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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