A compelling story combined with thoughtful analysis of the development, application and limitations of a new model of...
How a group of farsighted Army officers gradually forced competence in fighting insurgents upon a hostile military establishment.
When David Petraeus graduated from West Point in 1974, there were no courses on counterinsurgency. The generals were only interested in training for the next real war, by which they meant tank battles on the plains of Europe. The collapse of the world's third-largest tank army in Desert Storm persuaded some young officers that such a war would never happen. American forces would instead fight small wars against insurgencies—a word that was taboo in the Pentagon for years—and it would be necessary to study and train for these wars if the Army was to conduct them successfully. Pulitzer Prize winner Kaplan (1959: The Year Everything Changed, 2010, etc.) describes how a cadre of officers, of whom Petraeus was only the most prominent, risked reputations and careers to struggle to overturn the Army's institutional aversion to counterinsurgency. These "insurgents," as they thought of themselves, assembled doctrines and procedures for fighting such wars from long-ignored, nearly forgotten texts, white papers and dissertations, then field-tested them with considerable success when they were urgently needed in Iraq. Kaplan describes the networking and bureaucratic maneuvering involved as the participants read each other's papers, met at conferences and began appointing each other to influential positions until they succeeded in establishing counterinsurgency as a centerpiece of American military strategy. Along the way, the author incisively examines some of the inherent shortcomings of counterinsurgency doctrine, explaining why it is difficult for Americans to support this approach and why it was more likely to succeed in Iraq than in Afghanistan, where the Obama administration is moving to a more conventional counterterrorism approach.
A compelling story combined with thoughtful analysis of the development, application and limitations of a new model of applying American military power. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was completed prior to the news of the Petraeus scandal.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4263-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
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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