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
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.
