A moving account of bravery.
The terrible toll of the Marine Corps’ ferociously fighting Third Platoon in Afghanistan, within the context of a larger failed U.S. effort.
Embedded with the Third in January 2011 during its dangerous drive to clear out the Taliban from Sangin, a poppy-farming community in southern Afghanistan bordering Helmand province, war correspondent and Marine veteran West (The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy and the Way Out of Afghanistan, 2011, etc.) offers a suspenseful account of the perilous mission, during which the platoon suffered a greater than 50 percent casualty rate. Though the objective of the mission—winning over the Sangin tribes of farmers, installing a turbine at the Kajaki Dam and instilling a “nation-building” ethos through the U.S. military’s counterinsurgency policy—was not achieved, West demonstrates the tenacity and cohesion that kept this fighting force together and driven despite the horrendous conditions. The author gives a terrific overview of the Western attempt after 9/11 to expunge Al-Qaida, while the U.S. remained ostensibly to build a democratic nation. Yet the Taliban crept back in to secure the wealth of the poppy fields, routinely attacking the British garrison around the district market and ringing it with IEDs. When the Marines went in with President Barack Obama’s call for a surge, the mission was to “drive the enemy out of Helmand by walking every foot of farmland”—6,000 steps per day. Despite the confusion about the goal, downgrading “defeat” of the Taliban to “diminish,” and attempting to win hearts and minds rather than killing their way to victory, the U.S Marines took over from the British and kept their sights on defeating the enemy. The battle-hardened Marines lived in caves and were frequently blown apart by IEDs, leaving shock and anger and a fresh will to move forward. West’s last chapter, “Who Will Fight for Us?” offers a heart-rending assessment of the collapse of this long war of attrition.
A moving account of bravery.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1400068746
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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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