A frank, significant look at how the proliferation of foreign military bases has “helped lock us inside a permanently...
America’s seldom thought of, and largely misunderstood, military outposts around the globe are brought into sharp relief.
The idea that it costs more than $100 billion each year to maintain the United States’ roughly 800 military installations spread throughout the world is easy enough to grasp, and there are many who will say that the hefty price tag is well worth the cost. However, Vine (Anthropology/American Univ.; Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia, 2009) effectively argues that the true costs of all those bases—whether euphemistically called FOBs, lily pads, or a host of other monikers—encompass a lot more than what is in Uncle Sam’s wallet. Ostensibly meant to protect American security at the close of World War II, Vine demonstrates how both the rationale behind the rise of U.S. military bases abroad and their implementation run counter to many closely held American ideals. Readers on the left will be particularly chagrined to learn that liberal lion Franklin Roosevelt orchestrated a plan that regurgitated and repackaged old-time colonialism in the name of national security. The author also illuminates the series of forced evacuations, expulsions, and evictions that devastated whole societies all across the Pacific, Latin America, and beyond, and he shows how little the government had learned after the Trail of Tears 100 years prior. Citizens could still wave the flag and extoll democratic principals here at home, but Vine further demonstrates how they did so oblivious to the autocrats that continued to fill the upper tiers of the American military. The powers that be may have successfully swept many previous sins under the carpet in the wake of World War II, but according to Vine, continuing to maintain U.S. military bases around the world doesn't make any sense in a post–9/11 world.
A frank, significant look at how the proliferation of foreign military bases has “helped lock us inside a permanently militarized society that in many ways has made all of us less safe and less secure.”Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62779-169-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
