Feifer’s thoughtful, deliberative use of eyewitness testimony gives an intensely close-up sense of what the war was like for...
Blow-by-blow account of the Soviet Union’s nine-year military occupation of Afghanistan, which gained little, wasted lives and helped bring down a formidable empire.
Feifer took advantage of his position as NPR’s Moscow correspondent to conduct interviews with participants that enabled him to penetrate the Russian reasoning behind the invasion of Afghanistan on December 27, 1979. Moscow’s incursion into its small Central Asian neighbor was intended as a quick hit. It stemmed partly from Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev’s hurt feelings over the ouster and murder of the country’s first communist president by the ruthless Hafizullah Amin, partly by fears that erupting civil violence would disturb Moscow’s hard-won hegemony in the region. The senile Politburo had no real understanding of Afghanistan’s ethnic divisions, or of the largely illiterate populace’s resistance to modernization and long-standing resentment of foreign invaders. The Russian quagmire in Afghanistan, which claimed the lives of some 75,000 Soviets and 1.25 million Afghans, has been compared to America’s debacle in Vietnam, but Feifer sees a more apt parallel in America’s inability to extricate itself from Iraq. The Soviet invaders shot Amin as an enemy of the people, installed Babrak Karmal as president and flooded the country with troops and arms. The Americans, Saudis and Chinese (among others) aided the mujahideen, rural leaders who overcame ethnic, tribal and economic divisions to unite under Islam, defying the Soviets from their base in the Pakistani mountains. After Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, he made withdrawal an official policy, though ending the war proved harder than starting it. The last plane left Kabul on February 15, 1989. The war’s ramifications would prove long and bitter for both superpowers, as Feifer sketches in a too-brief final chapter. Invisible History by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, also forthcoming in January, offers more material on Afghanistan’s current plight.
Feifer’s thoughtful, deliberative use of eyewitness testimony gives an intensely close-up sense of what the war was like for those who fought it.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-114318-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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
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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