While the book will appeal mostly to military history and combat tale buffs, the story is suspenseful and well-written...
Journalist Lewis (co-author: Sergeant Rex: The Unbreakable Bond Between a Marine and His Military Working Dog, 2011, etc.) highlights the soldier’s point of view in a tale from the front lines in Iraq.
In the spring of 2003, 60 soldiers were given orders to infiltrate Iraq from the northern border and negotiate the surrender of Iraqi forces, numbering nearly 100,000 in the area. Mostly British special services, with a few American and Australian soldiers in the mix, the men underwent three weeks of special desert training. While some of the older and/or more senior men had fought in the first Iraq war, most of the soldiers were completely new to both desert combat and working from vehicles. Lewis tells the story of the operation from the point of view of an older solider, Steve Grayling, though he acknowledges in the introduction that many names have been changed. Grayling was one of the few soldiers who had fought in Iraq before the Zero Six Bravo mission, and his narrative voice lends experience, gravitas and an appropriate amount of humor to the story. From the beginning, the operation was plagued with seemingly insurmountable problems. In addition to a serious training deficit, they were also dealing with lack of intel, little to no backup, a serious sleep deficit and supply constraints. Lewis does an excellent job of maintaining tension despite readers’ knowledge that the men survive. He vividly recounts the soldiers’ fatigue, stress and fear, arguing that many of the media reports, which often claimed desertion and cowardice, were simply wrong. Though acronyms and technical terms abound, they rarely interrupt the flow of the narrative, and Lewis includes a glossary to ease confusion.
While the book will appeal mostly to military history and combat tale buffs, the story is suspenseful and well-written enough for a wider audience to enjoy.Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62365-137-4
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Mobius
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | GENERAL HISTORY
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
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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