A searing exposé that might make readers wonder how Army commanders and civilian warmongers sleep at night given the...
The shameful story of how the U.S. Army has played a role in the mistreatment of traumatized soldiers who served in Iraq, then returned to Fort Carson, Colo., to commit rapes, murders and other violent crimes.
Colorado Springs Gazette features writer Philipps grew up in Colorado Springs, the locale of Fort Carson. Earlier this decade, he began to learn about the post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) suffered by thousands of returning Army infantrymen who both saw and committed atrocities in Iraq. (The same phenomenon is unfolding among American soldiers returning from Afghanistan, but that is not the focus here.) The author looks at soldiers from one specific combat team, some of whom dubbed themselves “the lethal warriors,” patterned loosely on the now-famous Band of Brothers from World War II. As the book opens in December 2007, a Colorado Springs newspaper carrier finds one of the PTSD-disabled soldiers, Kevin Shields, dead on the street. Somebody murdered Shields, but at first police and Fort Carson authorities could not identify a viable suspect. It turns out that Shields’ colleagues from Iraq killed their comrade. Some of the rampaging Fort Carson personnel had built up criminal records before joining the military, but others had not, and certainly none had been previously convicted of a violent crime. Philipps names names as he demonstrates an entire military chain of command in denial about the very existence of PTSD. The few commanders who would acknowledge the problem refused to institute meaningful treatment or safeguards to protect innocent bystanders from assaults. However, the author does identify one military hero from the PTSD realm—Maj. Gen. Mark Graham, who took charge of Fort Carson and supported treatment programs that have reduced the carnage in Colorado Springs.
A searing exposé that might make readers wonder how Army commanders and civilian warmongers sleep at night given the disgraceful handling of traumatized veterans who fought in Iraq.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-230-10440-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
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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