A hawkish book that will likely please “America Firsters” and xenophobes but might seem unbalanced to those who decry...
The chief national security correspondent for CNN, journalist Sciutto explores a variety of dangers to the standing of the United States in the world order, with an emphasis on the dastardly plans of Russia and China.
Sciutto (Against Us: The New Face of America's Enemies in the Muslim World, 2008) focuses on threats to the U.S. military on the ground, in the air, and on the sea, and he also devotes chapters to cyberattacks and industrial espionage targeting American corporations. “This is a book about what happens when the enemies of the West realize that while they are unlikely to win a shooting war, they have another path to victory,” he writes. Throughout, the author’s tone is largely alarmist in nature, as he explains why he believes naïve and/or incompetent U.S. policymakers are ceding influence to the increasingly aggressive Chinese and Russians. Sciutto views the nationalism around the globe as a deadly game of winners and losers, with few shades of grey. He rarely portrays the U.S. government and military as the perpetrators of unwelcome aggressions across national borders. Rather, he suggests the U.S. is almost always the victim of an increasingly desperate Russia and a surging China. Sciutto portrays each non-American nation as a monolith lacking a substantial minority of dissenters. Some of the scenarios he examines will not be familiar to a broad swath of Americans—e.g., Russian cyberwarfare against its former state of Estonia. Many readers will be interested in Sciutto’s account of Russian hacking during the 2016 presidential election. However, while his review is useful, it contains no stunning revelations and is certain to be out of date by the time the book publishes.
A hawkish book that will likely please “America Firsters” and xenophobes but might seem unbalanced to those who decry several centuries of U.S. aggression around the globe.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-285364-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2019
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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