A history that illuminates the personalities and driving motivations behind the current crisis in Iraq. Much of the story...
A political scientist unearths the decision-making process that led to the first Gulf War and its undesirable aftermath, arguing that the current war in Iraq should be understood through the prism of the first.
Alfonsi began this project while a doctoral student at Harvard in the ’90s, with the goal of exploring why Bush the First’s administration had been so successful in leading the 1991 war to get Saddam Hussein to remove his troops from Kuwait, and why the same leaders had been so ineffective in the aftermath. Before the second Bush administration, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Alfonsi writes that he had the good fortune of obtaining interviews with many of the key players, including then–Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and George H.W. Bush himself. The author details American involvement with Saddam, the U.S. first using him as a bulwark against Iranian expansionism, and then positioning him as “Hitler revisited” after the dictator, racked with debt, invaded neighboring Kuwait. While the former president was masterful at building a pre-war international coalition, Alfonsi shows that his administration’s preparation for the post-war—when it deliberately left Saddam in power—was sorely lacking. This became even clearer when, in the years after the war, Saddam chose times such as the Balkan crisis to act up and defy the U.N. Bush’s triumph turned to embarrassment, and he was voted out of office in 1992. The lesson learned by those around the president—as well as neoconservatives outside the administration—was that unless Saddam was dealt with, he would always be an irritant. The invasion of Iraq in 2003, the author argues, was a reaction of George W. Bush’s advisors to their humiliation by Saddam 11 years earlier.
A history that illuminates the personalities and driving motivations behind the current crisis in Iraq. Much of the story that emerges is familiar, though told in greater depth.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-51598-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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
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