A timely, eye-opening historical analysis that provides clarity around the difficult choices the next president faces.
Balanced, panoramic assessment of the Iraq War by former Marine and Reagan administration veteran West (No True Glory, 2005, etc.), who heralds American soldiers as its unsung heroes amid the “fog of Washington.”
The story of the initial years, familiar from other books, is covered expeditiously: America rushed to war in 2003 with limited troops and no postwar plan; proconsul Paul Bremer, inexperienced and isolated, dissolved the Iraqi army and banished Baathists, setting the stage for a Sunni-based insurgency; President Bush remained stubbornly uninvolved in the details. American troops couldn’t easily identify al-Qaeda insurgents who wore civilian clothes, the author notes; this allowed al-Qaeda to incite a civil war by murdering Shiites who then retaliated against the Sunnis. What makes West’s book fresh and exciting is his ability to weave together two narrative strands. Compelling, firsthand accounts of the war, recorded while embedded with the troops, highlight bravery and leadership on the battlefield. By contrast, incisive strategic analyses of the war unearth a fundamental contradiction between pre-surge military strategy, aimed at quickly transitioning counterinsurgency leadership to corrupt Iraqi forces who wouldn’t do the job, and Bush’s policy of winning the war by eradicating all insurgents. The author is indignant at the president’s intellectual laziness, which led to Bush recusing himself from military strategy. West also demonstrates that, by granting complete sovereignty to Iraq, the president allowed sectarian Prime Minister Maliki to undermine the troops’ authority by protecting Shiite militias. When Democrats took control of Congress in 2006, however, Bush finally fired Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, pressured Maliki and launched a surge that partnered American soldiers with local populations to eradicate al-Qaeda in a bottoms-up approach, achieving a reduction in violence. West’s concluding assessment is sobering: America might have to stay for years to consolidate the surge’s fragile gains; a quick exit could lead to chaos.
A timely, eye-opening historical analysis that provides clarity around the difficult choices the next president faces.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6701-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2008
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
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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