A cogent analysis of today’s nuclear dangers and a plea for international action, unlikely to occur as long as America wants...
Veteran journalist Schell (A Hole in the World: A Story of War, Protest and the New American Order, 2004, etc.) warns that the nuclear peril he described in The Fate of the Earth (1982) remains, in new and nasty forms.
Readers expecting an update of his classic account of the terrible effects of atomic war will discover the author in a more philosophical mood here. The collapse of the USSR eliminated any need for nuclear arsenals, he avers, yet they are still with us, and additional nations are considering building their own. Discussing the peculiar fascination of atomic weapons, which is absent from other horrors such as germ warfare or poison gas, the author divides those who advocate them into three groups: nuclear realists, who consider the bomb a simple weapon of war; nuclear romantics, who look on it as a symbol of national honor; and nuclear Wilsonians (as in Woodrow Wilson), who yearn for a global institution to end war and believe that a nuclear arsenal qualifies. In Schell’s view, these categories help explain bizarre behavior such as India’s national outpouring of joy over its successful nuclear test and the United States’s financing of a trillion-dollar fleet of nuclear submarines, which has been patrolling the seas for two decades despite the absence of a major threat. The author reserves his greatest criticism for followers of President Bush who combine all three of the above viewpoints and do not conceal their contempt for treaties and international institutions that hinder America’s freedom of action. Bush’s original reason for invading Iraq, Schell maintains, contained a certain logic. It was regrettable that no WMDs turned up, but the invasion aimed to warn irresponsible national leaders that building a nuclear arsenal might earn them a taste of the same medicine. Regrettably, the subsequent debacle accomplished no such thing.
A cogent analysis of today’s nuclear dangers and a plea for international action, unlikely to occur as long as America wants to handle matters on its own.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8129-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
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
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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