A clever, incisive look at great battles from Saratoga to the American invasion of North Korea at Inchon and their success or failure as per the principles of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.
Sun Tzu’s work, which appeared 2,400 years ago and has profoundly influenced Asian warfare for centuries, is full of axioms about military strategy, especially keeping a strong hand by striking the weak, and achieving success by indirect means, rather than direct. Mao Zedong apparently drew on Sun Tzu’s strategies in his effective guerrilla warfare against the Nationalists, and only then did Sun Tzu come to the attention of the West, translated by retired general Samuel B. Griffith in the 1960s. Military historian Alexander (Inside the Nazi War Machine: How Three Generals Unleashed Hitler's Blitzkrieg Upon the World, 2010, etc.) fashions an accessible narrative about the world’s most fascinating battles and how they were won or lost, according to the Chinese sage. For example, the Colonial American way of fighting the British—hiding behind trees and picking off the bright lines of stand-up mercenaries—would have won high marks from Sun Tzu. The British, however, failed to follow the most important maxims of war: Devise a practical plan to gain victory, advance into the enemy’s “vacuities” and know when to retreat. Napoleon, usually a master at striking indirectly, violated several of Sun Tzu’s maxims at Waterloo—namely, reliance on lame, sycophantic generals and waging a frontal attack into the bulwark of Wellington’s army—and was submerged. Robert E. Lee, repeatedly ignoring the Sun Tzu–like advice of Stonewall Jackson, insisted on aggressive, direct and, ultimately, disastrous assaults. Alexander also examines other famous violations of Sun Tzu’s principles, including at the Marne 1914, Stalingrad and the Allied invasion of Normandy. A work as much fun to read as it is knowledgeable and authoritative.
Pub Date: May 31, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-393-07813-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
