Provocative, agile and very well argued, with an a-ha! moment on nearly every page.
An anthropological and psychological account of the human propensity for organized murderous mischief.
War, writes U.K.-based syndicated columnist Dyer, is not a consequence of civilization, as some scholars have argued; “it’s clear,” he asserts, “that modern human beings did not invent warfare. We inherited it.” The bequest comes courtesy of our Paleolithic and even protohominid ancestors, à la the opening scenes of 2001, yet supposedly civilized people have become ever so accomplished at developing new and improved ways to slaughter each other, and a hallmark of progress has been a steady advance in the effectiveness of our fighting forces. On the last point Dyer is particularly good; whereas primitives fought battles that were largely symbolic (if sometimes lethal), and whereas the vast majority of the weapons thrown down and abandoned at Gettysburg were loaded but not fired, as if to spare the enemy, modern martial societies such as the U.S. Marines instill the notion that their members are killers foremost. Killer or angel, field soldiers have short-term jobs: either they’re wounded or killed themselves, or they collapse psychically. The U.S. Army calculated during WWII, writes Dyer, that this breakdown occurs within 240 days of combat, while the British, who rotated soldiers from the line more frequently, allowed 400 days. Everyone was a candidate, but the reason psychiatric disorders did not show up more frequently in the casualty rolls, Dyer suggests, “was that most combat troops did not survive long enough to go to pieces.” Combat has changed since WWII, and individual soldiers have a somewhat better chance of survival, though the game keeps shifting: here, war is a matter of terrorism, there of conventional forces turned to genocide, and always the shadow of the Bomb hangs over us. War as an extension of politics “may seem either absurd or obscene to outsiders,” Dyer observes, adding that as long as people insist that war has its adherents, we need a genuinely strong United Nations to keep the planet from going up in flames.
Provocative, agile and very well argued, with an a-ha! moment on nearly every page.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1538-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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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