Clear-eyed, pertinent account from a leader who derives his experience from the trenches.
A former UN envoy to Afghanistan takes stock of his uneven, bracing two-year tour.
As the special representative to Afghanistan from 2008 to 2010, veteran Norwegian ambassador Eide presided over a tumultuous time overseeing presidential elections, as well as a transitional era between American administrations. He calls his tour “the two most dramatic years since the fall of the Taliban in 2001,” largely as the result of tension between Afghan authorities (and insurgents) and the international community. Preferred by President Karzai for his “mild-mannered” ways, Eide agreed with the president that more authority should be transferred to Afghan institutions in the administering of humanitarian and development aid. The UN mandate for the Assistance Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA) was to be a more aggressive leader in coordinating aid, while toeing a fine line between civilian and military organizations. Eide had to fill vacant positions and give the UN mission more political direction, while maintaining its independence (he reminds readers that the UN had been in Afghanistan since the late 1940s, not since 9/11). While the Bush administration was eager and ready to give the mission monetary support, there was little regulation of that bounty, resulting in highly paid middlemen and rampant corruption. With the arrival President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, a more rigorous accountability ensued, with something that looked like a real strategy—“in many ways similar to ours,” writes Eide. The author considers at length the international monitoring of the 2009 presidential elections (he depicts a remarkably close, frank relationship with Karzai), the rise of insurgency, often as the result of local resentment over the international presence, and a rapprochement with a (changed) Taliban. Eide writes persuasively from the Afghan point of view and urges the need for “Afghan ownership.”
Clear-eyed, pertinent account from a leader who derives his experience from the trenches.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61608-464-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
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 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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