Book Description
What went wrong at Ruby Ridge?
Why was Randy Weaver's son fatally shot in the back?
How could the FBI justify shooting a woman as she held her infant child?
Why were the Weavers given a $3.1 million settlement by the U.S. Government?
Was there an FBI cover-up and how high did it go?
Every Knee Shall Bow answers the critical questions that cut to the heart of the most explosive issues in the United States today.
The Weaver Family took to the woods to escape what they believed was a sinful world on the brink of Armageddon. But Randy Weaver's indictment on a firearms violation escalated into a deadly shoot out at his northern Idaho cabin. Before it was over, a federal marshal, Weaver's wife and his only son were dead.
Now, featuring exclusive interviews with key figures on both sides, Pulitzer Prize finalist Jess Walter objectively reconstructs all the riveting events in this controversial case.
Customer Reviews:
Both the goverment and the Weavers went to extremes.......2006-08-01
I found it fascinating. It's about crackpots (The Weavers) and F***ups (The Government). I found Randy Weaver to be lazy and maybe a coward. But I do believe that he loved his wife and family. Vicki was interesting. Her family almost lost their family farm as a kid due to eminent domain. They were going to build a freeway right though where the house was. I can understand why she didn't trust the government. She was also very bright and capable. Could sew clothes without a pattern (self taught), cook, can food, roofing, and learned to be an executive secretary. I think she was the one who did most of the building of the house on Ruby Ridge. I had to admire her even if her beliefs are wacky. She was the one who did the research trying to figure out "God's will". Randy would even ask "Is that what we believe now?" She was definitely head of the family. What she needed was someone who would keep her thinking from going off the deep end instead of Randy who would believe whatever she believed.
Randy seemed to know the Ayran Nations people because he held some of the same beliefs. But I think he was more interested in spouting his religious beliefs to them. I think he probably hung around them some because he was a talker. And that area of Idaho is full of odd people like himself and constitutionalists, survivalists and other people on the far right.
I don't like entrapment, which happened to him. There is plenty of people to catch that are lawbreakers without paying snitches to look for them. Just IMHO. Once law enforcement picked him up using entrapment again (this time pretending to need help looking like the vehicle broke down) it was just one mistake made after another. So many I can't describe them all even if I wanted to.
As much as I found the Weavers personal beliefs disgusting it's obvious to me the government went overboard trying to bring Randy to face charges. There was no reason that their son Sammy, Vicki and the dog got shot. Just overzealous U.S. Marshals.
A cautionary tale demostrating how easy it is for things to spin out of control. .......2006-02-04
Like others I contend that this book is far in a way the very best of all the retellings of the events on Ruby Ridge percisely because of the way the author decided to present the material.
The background data is nearly perfect providing just enough information to the reader while never hindering the flow of the story. The Weaver family come off at the same time as nice folk but terrible misguided, ill informed, and increasingly responsible for the self-fulfilling prophecies of destruction.
The seem so sympathetic that the reader almost feels pity for them because it is their ill founded fears and feeling based, unreasoning conviction in their own delusions that bring on the very things they fear. I related to the jury foreman(Jake Weaver - no relation to Randy) who said, "If I could have convicted him(Randy Weaver) for gross stupidity I would have."
However, compaired to the government blunders the Weavers look fantastic. The FBI is especially bad, not so much the agents as the leadership. The whole government response from the very first is overblown, fraught with worry, conspiracy thinking, and made things markedly worse than they already were and digresses into terrible infighting and intr-agency sniping while everyone fears liabiliy from the whole mis-handled affair.
The trial was excellent and a nearly perfect demonstration of how our criminal court system works trying to protect rights but often having to walk a tightrope on evidence and testimony, not to mention attorney behavior.
It this book is not the truth of what happened it is as close as we are ever likely to get. I highly recomend it without reservation other than warning the unsuspecting that in truthfully presenting the story there are occasional bits of colorful language, and some very distasteful and unbecoming verbalized racism of the worst sort and that I personally had hoped we as a nation had left far in our past.
Gripping.......2005-09-17
This book is probably the best known of all the books about this case.It is the book the 1996 Mini-series starring Laura Dern and Randy Quaid was based on. It is well researched and put together.
The book makes a fair attempt to stay neutral, but I think it was a bit too critical of the Weavers and too sympathetic towards the government on a couple of points.That does not at all diminish its value for someone seeking to learn about this case.Its an invaluable resource.The coverage of the trial is astounding. It spans several chapters and is intricately detailed.
The whole trial is covered from the pretrial preparations to the day Randy walked out of jail.
At the end of the book, I felt like I had just been on a long journey through these tragic events .I felt emotionally wrung out. I have been following this case for a long time and already knew a lot about the case but I ended up feeling even more saddened and outraged at what happened to the Weaver family, and I think reading this would make the majority of people marginally sympathetic to the Weavers, no matter how much we disagree with their religious beliefs.If you want to hear the story reported from both sides, this is the book for you.
The best of the big 3 on this incident.......2005-03-07
Jess Walter delivers a dramatic, thoroughly reported, well written account of the standoff at Ruby Ridge. Compared to the other two major books on this incident, this book plays it the straightest. He points some fingers, but only when deserving.
Even if you know the final outcome, this book is written well enough to still build some suspense to keep the reader readiing.
Overall, a very good book.
The Final Word.......2001-07-19
This excellent book may well be the definitive work on the tragedy of Ruby Ridge. I was prepared for another diatribe; either Randy Weaver the martyr or Randy Weaver the lawless, racist scum. Instead, Jess Walter has written a very even-handed chronicle that left me terribly sad.
If Walter's facts are right, (and they're certainly believable,) this was a story without unalloyed heroes or villains. He takes us through the Weaver family's odyssey from fundamentalist Christians to - well, whackos. He takes us through the story of how the U.S. Marshalls sent to bring in an everyday, minor fugitive found the case spinning out of their control, leaving them on a mountaintop with two people and a dog dead, and the whole world watching. And he explains the inexplicable; how on earth a law enforcement officer could be in a blind with a .308 and orders to shoot on sight.
This is one of the few really essential books I've read this year.
Book Description
On the last hot day of summer in 1992, gunfire cracked over a rocky knob in northern Idaho, just south of the Canadian border. By the next day three people were dead, and a small war was joined, pitting the full might of federal law enforcement against one well-armed family. Drawing on extensive interviews with Randy Weaver's family, government insiders, and others, Jess Walter traces the paths that led the Weavers to their confrontation with federal agents and led the government to treat a family like a gang of criminals.
This is the story of what happened on Ruby Ridge: the tragic and unlikely series of events that destroyed a family, brought down the number-two man in the FBI, and left in its wake a nation increasingly attuned to the dangers of unchecked federal power.
Customer Reviews:
A true story that pulls you in like a novel.......2005-08-20
This book is very well-written and informative. Through reading it one begins to see the motivations for seemingly unexpicable actions. Both sides of the story--the government's and the Weaver family's--are told with objectivity. Before reading this book, I had only heard very simplified versions of what happened at Ruby Ridge, but now I feel like I have a much better understanding. Randy Weaver doesn't come out like a folk hero as in some books about Ruby Ridge. He is portrayed as a regular person who made choices that he regretted, but for which he did not deserve to lose his son and wife. The reprehensible nature of the government's actions are shown in full light, including the inexcusable animalistic actions of the sniper who fired unprovoked on a woman holding a baby in her arms. I appreciated that a section was included which followed up on where the family is today.
The unbiased truth from the beginning to...the future........2003-01-07
I was raised in a rural part of Idaho, and was 17 during the summer of the Ruby Ridge siege. At the time all I got from the local media was that a crazy mountain man who had warrants for his arrest was holding Federal officers at bay on a remote mountain hours north of where I lived.
Eleven years later I read this book. It gave me the true story, from the beginning, of what really happened during that 11 day span that became such a historic event in our great state.
What it came down to, even past the feds having it out for Randy Weaver, was a Terrible lesson in miscommunication. When word got back to Washington, it was said that Randy Weaver had government agents "pinned down" by his "compound". The fact is, hours before, Federal agents had trespassed on the property, surprised Randy, his son, their dog, and their friend Kevin Harris. The result was the family dog being shot in the back, 12 year old Sammy Weaver being shot in the back as he ran away yelling "I'm coming dad!" and a Federal Marshall shot to death in self defense (I don't think there is much doubt who shot first).
In the days that follow, more blood would be shed; (Vicki Weaver is shot to death in the head by a sniper while holding her baby). Information would be re-scripted, re-tooled, and eventually covered up in many cases. One of the most compelling parts of the story is knowing why they stayed holed up in their cabin that long. Anyone that had ventured out before had been shot at!
Another interesting note that I did not know till reading this book was the neo-nazi connection. Weaver was not a neo-nazi, as the media portrayed him to be. He did however, know a couple of them in his passings in the area. The money and time spent to set up Randy so he would squeal on the Neo Nazi's was ridiculous. When he simply said "no, I don't want to have any part of it, I just want to mind my own business and be left alone". Now you would think they would honor this and let him be, but no. They changed the rules of engagement so that they could ultimately and hopefull slaughter all involved...and for what? Because they had different religious beliefs? What possible threat did one quiet mountain family have againt anyone?
On a lighter note, it was nice to see the new experiences that the oldest daughter enjoyed when moving in with relatives back in Iowa. Getting to see her first movie on a theatre screen (which led her to get a job in the theatre soon after) and listening to rock music was something many of us take for granted. This book is a must read if you are of an open mind. Despite religious or polotical views, everyone should read this book. It may change you're outlook on many things, if only for the better. I only hope there was a lessoned learned somewhere by those responsible, after what happened on a remote Idaho Mountain in the summer of '92.
Disturbing and Important.......2002-10-13
The book is both disturbing and important. It traces the tragedy of Ruby Ridge, Idaho from the very beginning, even before Idaho. It profiles Randy and Vicki Weaver when they first meant and follows through their marriage, their children and their move to Idaho. It explores their different beliefs in depth and both their problems and triumphs throughout their marriage.
It explains how the U.S. Marshall Service and the ATF first noticed Randy Weaver and why they were interested in him. Did they initially set him up? It explains what the reaction of the FBI was when they were called to the scene. How the government agencies invovled escalated the problem to a new level. How the lack of communication within the government made a bad situation worse.
It follows the aftermath of the seige and the shootings into the evidence gathering stage and through the trial. It follows the survivors and what they have become, their tribulations.
This is a very important book for everyone to read. It is about lack of tolerance in others beliefs. About the governments miscommunications and lack of sharing information between departments. This has been going on for years, way before 9-11. It delves into the fact that government agencies don't like to admit they were wrong and will sacrifice the little guy to protect the big guy. It show that there is hard working decent people working for the government as well as complete self serving, intolerant, career mongers looking for nothing but advancement and the connections to insulate themselves from the decisions they've made.
Randy Weaver and his family thought differently than many. They wanted to be left alone. And they were pushed and pushed to the breaking point. Attacked and surrounded and attacked again. The Weaver's paid the price for their beliefs but the government agents that overstepped their bounds have never been brought to justice or even held accountable with more than meager 15 day suspensions. The courts felt the government wrong enough to award a monetary settlement to the Weaver's. When will the total truth come out?
This is an excellent book full of information and presented well. It is engrossing and pulls you in from the beginning. It reads well. I recommend it to everyone.
Book Description
This extraordinary story of General Grant's overland campaign and the unique role played by the troops from the state of Vermont also includes never-before-published material on the experiences on the home front. The Battered Stars is a new and unique contribution to the literature of the War Between the States. Civil War historian Howard Coffin has unearthed never-before-seen archival sources to bring first-hand reports from the battlefields of Spotsylvania, The Wilderness, and many others. He also tells the story of the home front, taking us behind the lines to dozens of small towns in Vermont to show how the great battles of the Civil War affected the lives of ordinary citizens. Archival prints and photographs illustrate the extraordinary bravery at the battlefront and granite-like resolve at home that brought victory, but at a phenomenal price. Includes of a great deal of "back home" information—a whole new focus for the National Park Service. 75 black and white photographs and illustrations, 5 maps, index.
Customer Reviews:
Enjoyable for historians and buffs .......2007-06-02
I did not quite know what to expect from this book considering it was published by a non-academic press and written by a political bureaucrat, but I was pleasantly surprised by its quality. Battered Stars is well written and informative, adding a new fresh perspective to an over-studied portion of the Civil War. I have read over a hundred Civil War books and I have seen many second rate efforts by non-professionals, but Battered Stars is highly recommended. My only wish is that Coffin had used professional footnotes to show exactly where his quotes were coming from, but most sources are nonetheless clear.
BATTERED BUT STILL BRAVE.......2005-12-19
In the Preface, the author, Howard Coffin, states "I doubt that any northern states suffered more sever losses during a limited period of time than did Vermont during the Overland Campaign." Page 20 notes "In the great eastern battles of the last spring and early summer of 1864, no northern state, certainly on a per capita basis, would pay a higher price than little Vermont." The Vermont Brigade was unique it that it had been formed entirely of the regiments from a single state.
Coffin provides an excellent narrative of the brigade's combat experiences in the battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, North Anna River and Cold Harbor in the Army of the Potomac's 40 day Overland Campaign. Here, the Vermonters suffered distortional high casualties. For example, in defending the Wilderness crossroads "The killed and wounded of the Vermont Brigade numbered 1200" as they "suffered one-tenth the entire loss of Grant's army in killed and wounded in the Wilderness." Extensive use of soldier's letters and diaries greatly adds to the narratives with family correspondence giving insight into wartime life in small-town Vermont. Most interesting is Chapter Eight's account of the treatment of the wounded in hastily organized field hospitals and later treatment at Fredericksburg and in Vermont.
The narrative of fighting in the trenches at Cold Harbor is most fascinating. The author states "The Confederate victory (Cold Harbor) had been the most one-sided of the war." There were no big attacks but rather "day by day the killing went on while night by night, the works were dug deeper and became more complex." WWI Trench warfare was reminiscent of this campaign and with only a change in army names and location, Cold Harbor would describe a 1917 battle on the Western Front. The text contains a brief but interesting account of Grant's evacuation from Cold Harbor, the crossing of the James River and the initiation of the siege of Petersburg, Virginia.
Finally, the text deals with Vermont's substantial combat losses and the post war Vermont public reaction to the Civil War. The total loss of the state of Vermont in the Overland Campaign approached 3000 men. "Among the fallen were some of the bravest and best."
As prominent Civil War historian James McPherson states on the book's dust jacket, "This is Civil War history at its best."
A Vivid Account of a Devastating Campaign.......2002-07-25
Howard Coffin has established himself as the premier authority on Vermont and the Civil War. He has exhaustively researched Vermont's historical records including countless letters and diaries from the actual participants. He allows them to directly share their personal, heroic, sorrowful and inspiring stories and insights. It is difficult today to appreciate the pain and suffering which was brought home to every Vermont family during this Campaign. Mr. Coffin does honor to their memories and has provided a valuable research source for those interested in this period.
Founded on a wealth of primary sources and archival material.......2002-06-07
A powerful historical account of Vermont's role in the Civil War, The Battered Stars: One State's Civil War Ordeal During Grant's Overland Campaign by American Civil War historian and expert Howard Coffin (himself a sixth generation Vermonter with four ancestors who served with the Vermont regiments in the Overland Campaign) is founded on a wealth of primary sources and archival materials, including wartime letters, diaries, and newspaper accounts. The state of Vermont paid a toll in blood from the strife of the war, and the brutal battles are explored in detail as well as the resolve of those who stayed at home and did their best to keep the wheels turning. A welcome and much appreciated contribution to the growing field of Civil War Studies, The Battered Stars is a powerful, fascinating account highly recommended for civil war buffs, as well as anyone native to Vermont who wants to immerse themselves in the gripping saga of a watershed time of civil war.
Book Description
This second edition is updated throughout to cover the Bush administration's global communication efforts.
Customer Reviews:
Intern's Screed Masquerading as Informed Criticism -- This Book is Badly Written and Researched .......2006-07-19
Bad, both as history and as analysis, even the neo-Marxist sort that it unabashedly mimics. It's an embarrassment that the author has managed to turn this screed into an academic career as an expert on "public diplomacy." That she has done so offers a lesson on ambitious self-promotion in the academic world. She purports to tell the story about the former USIA, and ends telling no story at all.
She also misses the essential point about the former USIA: that its work was primarily in the field, people-to-people, and had little to do with politicized Washington policy-makers and attitudes of various administrations. Her litany of pleas for a sense of the real America of working-class people misses completely the large majority of Americans who are religious and socially conservative, exactly the kind of Americans who resonate well with Africans and Latin Americans, to name two important parts of the world. This isn't surprising for someone who freely cites Marxist Howard Zinn and places his photo on her website.
Ultimately, however, this non-book is just sad. USIA was a failure in many ways, but the story deserves to be told by a real historian, not a sham professor of "communications" who happened to do an internship in the now-dead USIA. Now that Snow has set the standard for interns, I'm waiting for Monica Lewinsky's analysis of the presidency.
Disappointing and misleading.......2004-12-25
The pamphlet (so it describes itself internally) is titled as if it were a discussion of the US propaganda establishment, but is in truth a sketchy and afactual memoir of a two-year Clinton-era
internship in USIA. The pamphlet is only 60 pages long, being
prefaced by laudatory and emotional prefaces that stretch to 30
pages, probably reflecting some demand of the printing process.
About 20 pages of the pamphlet is devoted to demanding that the USIA be disbanded, the remainder to rambling far-left invectives
against the NAFTA, "globalization", "hegemonic corporations" and
other betes noires. This pamphlet may well be part of a tenure-quest rather than a knowledge quest. The reader is advised to seek knowledge elsewhere.
Great Work.......2003-06-11
I had never heard of the United States Information Agency until I read this book. Among other public diplomacy (read: propaganda) duties, the USIA is responsible for Radio Marti, the pro-US propaganda beamed in to Cuba and the Fullbright scholar program. The reason those of us living in the US don't know too much about the USIA's mission is that they are not allowed to use their propaganda skills on US citizens, even though their predecessor organization, the Committee on Public Information (CPI) was created during the Wilson administration specifically to convince the people of the US that fighting the Germans in World War I was critical to the security of the American homeland.
Post cold-war and especially during the Clinton administration, the USIA became the mouthpiece of NAFTA and the evangelization of people in other countries of the benefits of accepting American-style economies. This very brief book outlines much of this history and the author Nancy Snow makes it clear that any positive aspects of the program like the Fullbright program have been long buried under the pro-business propaganda machine of the Clinton and Bush the Younger administrations. The Fullbright program in particular became a tool to influence thought on market economics in Mexico and Canada, whose citizens were ambivalent about the promises of economic development promised by NAFTA.
Today, much of the USIA's work has been rolled into the State Department, headed by former advertising executive Charlotte Beers, who is charged with "rebranding America to the world" like the Uncle Ben's Rice she used to work on. The USIA is one of the vehicles of US economic and cultural hegemony, especially in countries that we can't go to war with. Snow's history and analysis ends with an action plan that is wider reaching than simply what to do with the USIA. It is really a series of concrete ideas for reforming the very government of our country.
One dollar, one vote........2003-05-07
This small book tells the story of the USIA (the US Information Agency), a government unit.
This institution was created with very good intentions (increase mutual understanding between people), but was diverted from its original goal and streamlined as a propaganda machine to promote the US economic system and business interests.
The author rightly stigmatizes harshly the democratic deficit in the US: a media monopoly, a political duopoly ruled by big business and big money, and a plutocracy which dominates without control public welfare, public lands, public airwaves and the pension trusts.
Prof. Snow proposes a seven point plan to restore true democracy, but the implementation will be extremely difficult, if not impossible.
This book should be read as a classic example of how particular interest groups take control of a public institution and turn it into a pro-private interests mouthpiece.
Not to be missed.
finally!.......2003-03-14
Someone please put this woman on TV!
Product Description
Speak up for Democracy: What You Can Do -- A Practical Plan of Action for Every American Citizen. World War 2 era book from Edward Bernays published in 1940 celebrating democracy and freedom with simple yet effective propaganda texts. Interesting chapter entitled Saboteurs of Democracy explains how to identify and counteract the enemies of Democracy.
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Fairfield County Business Journal, published by Westfair Communications, Inc. on October 6, 2003. The length of the article is 769 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Poor editorial decision creates propaganda.(Patriot National Bancorp Inc.)(Webster Financial Corp.)(Computer Resolutions Inc.)
Author: Ed Klein
Publication:
Fairfield County Business Journal (Magazine/Journal)
Date: October 6, 2003
Publisher: Westfair Communications, Inc.
Volume: 42
Issue: 40
Page: 47(1)
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Average customer rating:
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