Lost Son

December 1, 2022

With King, the New York Times best-selling Eig ( Ali), a former senior writer for the Wall Street Journal, draws on recently declassified FBI files to create a bold new study of Martin Luther King Jr. (100,000-copy first printing). Drafted by the FBI as a trilingual counterterrorism researcher, Billy Reilly went to Russia when it first invaded Ukraine's Donbas region and promptly cut off all communication; it was unclear whether the FBI actually sent him, but Reilly's parents asked Wall Street Journal reporter Forrest to find their Lost Son (100,000-copy first printing). AsSlate staff writer Grabar clarifies in Paved Paradise, parking matters; we've distorted our landscape to find cheap and easy ways to store our cars, with much valuable real estate devoted to vehicles sitting empty when space for affordable housing is desperately needed; at least Grabar proposes solutions. Following This Is Not a T-Shirt, a memoir about his clothing brand, Hundreds (aka Bobby Kim) limns his venture into NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), Web3, and the Metaverse in NFTs Are a Scam / NFTs Are the Future (75,000-copy first printing). Former secretary of the Treasury and cochair of Goldman Sachs, Rubin draws on six decades' worth of experience in business and politics to explain how to make smart decisions in an uncertain world; it all begins with sketching out the possibilities on a simple Yellow Pad (or now an iPad). In Traffic, former BuzzFeed editor in chief Smith shows how Nick Denton's Gawker and Jonah Peretti's HuffPost and BuzzFeed fatefully duked it out for control of internet media in the early 2000s, arguing that the unintended consequence was a rightward shift in the internet's orientation. Windham-Campbell Award-winning South African writer Steinberg shows how the marriage of Winnie and Nelson Mandela reflects the course of South African history and tensions within the antiapartheid movement, as Winnie moved toward supporting armed insurrection while Nelson was jailed.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2023
A complex tale of espionage and betrayal against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine. Billy Reilly was a loner who, while his friends were playing sports and video games, was learning languages and reading advanced books. Not long after 9/11, he announced his conversion to Islam, which was no mere contrarianism. He then set about learning Arabic and other languages, including Russian--which made him an attractive subject for the intelligence community, especially since he'd been appearing in supposed terrorist chat rooms. Wall Street Journal national security reporter Forrest, who has been covering this story for years, chronicles how Reilly traveled to Russia in 2015, where, in theory, he was going to accompany a humanitarian relief mission to the insurgent Donbas region. Instead, Forrest hazards, he might have been feeding information to a U.S. agency. But which one? The FBI--an agent of which showed up at Reilly's home one day even as he was across the ocean--denied knowing about him, saying it was the CIA's purview, with one agent saying, "The FBI doesn't give a shit about Ukraine and Russia." The CIA professed plausible deniability. Following his diligent investigation, Forrest eventually learned that Reilly was killed somewhere on the front, presumably by Russian state intelligence. Even as the FBI denied knowledge, the agency's third-in-command asked to speak off the record, leading Forrest to conclude that Reilly's case "was dangerous enough for the Bureau's third-highest official to have it top of mind." No definitive answer emerges from these pages despite the dogged research on the parts of Reilly's family, private investigators, politicians, the intelligence agencies, and Forrest himself. The lesson to draw is to warn any smart young person without moorings to stay away from the government's hollow promises, which soon turn, as Forrest so capably shows, to denial. An intriguing, somber study of the manipulation of a single person in the context of big events.

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June 5, 2023
Wall Street Journal reporter Forrest (The Big Fix) delivers an uneven account of FBI informant Billy Reilly, who disappeared in Ukraine in 2015. Born in 1986 to working-class Catholic parents in Oxford, Mich., Reilly felt like an outsider as a teen, but found purpose after the 2001 al-Qaeda terror attacks, when he converted to Islam and began connecting with terrorist sympathizers in online forums. This activity brought him to the attention of the FBI in 2010; he was enlisted as a source and instructed to monitor Islamic fundamentalists online. In 2015, after Russian separatists in the Donbas region of Ukraine declared independence, Reilly traveled to Russia, where he fell out of touch with his parents. Eventually, Forrest was able to match Reilly’s fingerprints with those of an unidentified corpse found in Donbas in 2015. Forrest, drawing on evasive conversations with FBI agents and Russian separatists, suggests the FBI exploited Reilly, following a known pattern of manipulating informants into taking intelligence-gathering risks; according to Forrest, Reilly was strung along by his handlers with the promise that he would be given a real job at the agency. However, Forrest uncovers no solid evidence that proves Reilly intended to spy for the U.S. in Donbas or that he was killed for being a spy. This highly speculative account raises more questions than it answers.