Smart and well-argued—and sure to anger at least some in the Pentagon.
A literate, adventure-filled history of “special warfare” fought by small bands of hunters of men whose services, it appears, will be ever more in demand.
That history, writes Leebaert (Government/Georgetown Univ.; The Fifty-Year Wound, 2002), is “to be found among the interstices of day-to-day friction and counterblows of tribes rising into city-states, into robust nations and then perhaps into empires and superpowers.” WWII buffs know all about the epic battles between Nazis and Russians on the eastern front and Nazis and the other Allies in the west, whereas even the best-informed student of modern military history may not know much about the activities of the Lurps in Vietnam or the Delta Force in Afghanistan—for special-operations soldiers from the Myrmidons to the Gray Ghosts to the modern SAS aim to keep their activities secret. Leebaert offers a sweeping, quite fascinating look at these soldiers through history, remarking on the astonishing abilities of a few well-trained fighters who put “a premium on knowledge” to disrupt whole nations. He braves controversy by including in the mix the 9/11 hijackers, the Viet Cong, the minions of Somali warlords and assorted other bad guys, but the point is well taken; it is because so many battles are now being fought on “unfixed terrain” against stateless and irregular forces that fighters such as the Green Berets and Russia’s Spetsnaz are becoming central, and invaluable, less an adjunct in need than “a systematic arm of war.” Leebaert courts more controversy with his harsh assessment of the conduct of the Iraq war and the larger war on terrorism and about the capabilities of the current (“inept”) Secretary of Defense. He seems to stand on incontestable ground, however, when he prophesies that more terrorist mayhem is to come.
Smart and well-argued—and sure to anger at least some in the Pentagon.Pub Date: March 23, 2006
ISBN: 0-316-14384-7
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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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