Valuable for students of naval strategy and geopolitics as well as of Cold War history.
Former Secretary of the Navy Lehman (On Seas of Glory: Heroic Men, Great Ships, and Epic Battles of the American Navy, 2001, etc.) unfolds the Ronald Reagan–era strategy to reclaim United States dominance on the high seas and contain the Soviet fleet.
In the aftermath of World War II and the early years of the Cold War, writes the author, the U.S. Navy was devalued in favor of the Air Force even as the fleet was required to carry nuclear weapons, which “required much additional manpower and shipboard space.” Even before Reagan took office in 1981, he had been promising a program of “naval rearmament and maritime superiority.” After winning the election, he assembled a team, including Lehman, to bring this program into being. Among the author’s innovations was a push to assert an American and NATO presence in the Arctic and “the icy bastions that the Soviet sailors considered their domain.” Exercises involving U.S. Marines and other Allied forces in the far north brought the point home, to the consternation of the Kremlin. Toward the end of Reagan’s first term, exercises with the South Korean military on an amphibious landing further agitated the Russians, who tried to catch up but could not. It helped that Reagan opened up the treasury for a military spending spree that the Soviets could not afford, but the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev to the scene was a critical factor; in time, the Soviets began to retreat from distant oceans, particularly lessening their presence in the Mediterranean. Lehman sounds downright Reagan-esque when he writes, “if the Americans were going to press up against Soviet coasts, they had better draw back and circle their wagons.” For the most part, though, this is a matter-of-fact, evenhanded look at a largely overlooked component in the eventual decline and collapse of the Soviet Union.
Valuable for students of naval strategy and geopolitics as well as of Cold War history.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-25425-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | 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
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
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