Solid history marked by memorable moments (including a glimpse of David Halberstam looting Saigon’s presidential palace) and...
Was JFK a hawk or a dove? Was the tragedy of Vietnam inevitable? Jones (History/Univ. of Alabama) provides a cord or two of fresh wood to fuel the ongoing debate.
The main focus here is the Kennedy administration’s dealings with the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, a man of extraordinary failings in a time that demanded flawless guidance. A Catholic in a Buddhist country, a keeper of secrets and secret bank accounts, a wily survivor of intrigues, ever quick to undo US reform efforts toward democratization, Diem proved to be a nightmare of a puppet. Kennedy, increasingly mistrustful of the American military that had steered him so badly wrong at the Bay of Pigs and was now apparently in the habit of lying to him at every turn, sought to extricate himself from the faltering alliance with Diem. Though he was warned away each time by dire predictions of Communist takeover, JFK eventually formulated and approved a plan that would have provided for the complete withdrawal of American troops from South Vietnam by 1965. That plan came a cropper for several reasons, Jones writes. When world attention was drawn to Vietnam in the wake of the Buddhist self-immolations and subsequent revolt (all of which infuriated Kennedy), the CIA and other elements of the American government encouraged a military coup that ended in Diem’s murder and the installation of a regime that may have been even worse. Kennedy himself was assassinated only three weeks later. Jones’s long, detailed what-if scenario raises intriguing questions, and he argues quite convincingly that had the coup not been bungled and Johnson not propelled to leadership, Vietnam may have ended quite differently—almost certainly not in the deaths of 58,000 Americans and untold hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese.
Solid history marked by memorable moments (including a glimpse of David Halberstam looting Saigon’s presidential palace) and the highly effective use of hitherto classified documents.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-19-505286-2
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
HISTORY | MILITARY | UNITED STATES | 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 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
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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