Not for everyone, but its target audience, however narrow, will love it.
Another testosterone-laced account of another elite combat specialty.
Prolific military writer Halberstadt (Army: The U.S. Army Today, 2006, etc.) maintains that individual snipers rack up more kills than entire brigades. While sharpshooters figured prominently in conflicts from the Revolutionary War to Vietnam, they did not become trained, high-tech professionals until the 1980s, when military thinkers began focusing on antiterrorism and small-unit actions. Snipers parachuted into Panama during the 1989 invasion and, according to one Halberstadt source, shot everyone in sight. They had few opportunities during the 1991 Gulf War, lots more during the ongoing campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, which dominate the book. Snipers never work alone, notes the author. Typically, groups of two to six include “shooters” and security. They move into enemy territory, hide and observe, remaining in radio contact with their base and with patrols in the area to provide invaluable intelligence. This may be all they provide, because under strict rules of engagement months may pass before they shoot. While “one shot, one kill” remains the ideal, it does not represent reality, especially at long distances, and today’s snipers hit targets beyond a mile. The author illustrates his subjects’ activities with a dozen oral histories, the book’s best portions. Military buffs will enjoy colorful accounts of the brutal training regimen plus nuts-and-bolts descriptions of weapons and high-tech observation gear. Ordinary infantry M4 carbines make many kills, Halberstadt notes, but the heavy, wildly expensive, precision-designed, slow-firing, bolt-action M24 is accurate over 2,000 meters. Many chapters describe unruly Iraqi neighborhoods suddenly peaceful because insurgents struck down by hidden snipers now fear showing themselves. Readers who wonder why this hasn’t won the war have picked the wrong book. Those who can turn off their critical faculties will enjoy the author’s admiring portrait of brave, superbly skilled Americans wreaking havoc among our enemies.
Not for everyone, but its target audience, however narrow, will love it.Pub Date: March 18, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-35456-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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 Yorkerstaff 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
© Copyright 2025 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.
