Excellent, as is Halberstam’s custom, and instructive for those seeking to understand geopolitical realities.
Another weighty tome from the noted journalist and historian, this one chronicling the sometimes confused, always complex junction of foreign policy and military might.
Halberstam (The Children, 1998, etc.), a familiar explainer of the ways of Washington, here turns his attention to an ongoing matter: the reshaping of the US military following the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War. When the armed services faced its first major test after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was in the one-sided Persian Gulf War, “a devastating four-day land war, a rout preceded by five weeks of lethal, high-precision, high-technology air dominance.” Halberstam focuses closely on John Warden, a “brilliant, truly innovative, and equally difficult” air force colonel who, having been sharply critical of the conduct of the Vietnam War, developed a doctrine of absolute air supremacy and of bombing the enemy into submission; he also looks closely at Warden’s civilian counterparts, who imposed political conditions on the military and, some critics have charged, prevented the Allied forces from taking Baghdad and putting an end to Saddam Hussein’s regime. Other recent military ventures, Halberstam observes, ended less successfully than the Gulf War, among them the disastrous American intervention in Somalia and the inconclusive invasion of Haiti; no international conflict exposed the weakness of American resolve and the ongoing legacy of the so-called Vietnam Syndrome than the outbreak of the war in Bosnia, about which the first Bush administration did next to nothing and the Clinton administration merely dithered. As always, Halberstam’s cast of characters numbers in the high dozens, and his fondness for encyclopedic detail lends a daunting air to an already dense discussion. Still, well-written and lucid, his narrative reveals a military that continues to be ill-coordinated to meet—and sometimes opposed to—the political ends of its civilian overseers, who in turn often seem terminally confused about the rest of the world.
Excellent, as is Halberstam’s custom, and instructive for those seeking to understand geopolitical realities.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-0212-0
Page Count: 548
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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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