A narrow but useful look at terror.
Novelist (Killing Time, 2000, etc.) and military historian (The Devil Soldier, 1991, etc.) Carr evaluates terror as a tactic, with an eye toward the US response to Osama bin Laden.
The lesson of terror, the author posits, is straightforward: it doesn’t work. Although terrorism seemed shockingly new on September 11, Carr argues that it’s but a variation on an old theme. Americans were quick to proclaim the attacks “acts of war,” and it is through this lens that Carr views terrorism. It is, he suggests, simply another way that warring parties have targeted noncombatants—a practice as old as war itself. More important, terrorism is a practice based on a misconception. Rather than intimidating an enemy into submission, it builds resentment that can last for generations. Carr offers many examples: Roman massacres of Germanic tribes under Augustus led to the raids by those same tribes nearly 500 later; William Tecumseh Sherman’s willingness to let northern troops plunder southern houses made reconciliation more difficult; and Israeli paramilitary groups inspired Palestinian terrorist organizations. The analysis is focused and evenhanded—each example demonstrates that terror leads to more of the same. Nor does Carr exempt the US from his critique. American policy, he claims, has often advocated civilian death in pursuit of its goals, and he cites the use of atomic weapons on Japan, napalm in Vietnam, and airstrikes in Kosovo. Carr, of course, is not the first to critique such methods of war, and he is as concerned with intellectual responses to what the Romans termed “destructive war” as he is with examples of its use. The problem is that he fails to consider the essence of what it was that troubled thinkers like Augustine and Hobbes. To both, wartime atrocities pointed to something more than a flaw in military strategy; terror was and remains a tactic that pushes the boundaries of reason: it is the point at which military objectives blend with bloodlust.
A narrow but useful look at terror.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50843-0
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002
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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