Forget the folderol about telling “the shocking hidden story of the peace process”—for almost nothing about the Vietnam War...
A blow-by-blow accounting of the peace negotiations that ended the war in Vietnam, complete with some (hardly earthshaking) recently declassified material.
Although Nixon and Kissinger spoke of peace with honor, historian Berman (Planning a Tragedy, not reviewed) claims that other goals dominated the protracted negotiations that led to the cessation of armed hostilities between the US and North Vietnam. The US consistently backed off from its promises to both Nguyen Van Thieu and the South Vietnamese people—in Kissinger’s words, it was necessary to “settle the military issues first and leave the political evolution to Vietnam . . . as long as it was done by reasonably democratic processes.” There was little doubt how that evolution would play out, given the puppet nature of the Thieu regime. Berman tells how the North Vietnamese had learned from their deception at the Geneva Accords of 1954 how to compromise, giving ground only at the last minute and forcing Kissinger into such preposterous comments as “These are our last proposals, but not an ultimatum.” While it is true that the US bailed on the South Vietnamese government in 1975, however, it seems somewhat naïve—what Spiro Agnew might have called a piece of ingenuous incredulity—on the part of Berman to call this a betrayal. As he points out himself in his delineation of the secret process of the negotiations, Thieu knew full well that the US considered him expedient only when he wasn’t being a hindrance. Berman’s near-daily recounting of the negotiations, though, combined with scene-setting (if stiff) portraits of all the main players, is a real lesson in the squirrelly craft of finding a road to peace, since someone always holds a better hand.
Forget the folderol about telling “the shocking hidden story of the peace process”—for almost nothing about the Vietnam War could come as a shock anymore. Appreciate this story instead as a choreography of the long and delicate peace dance, and all the toes that were stepped on along the way.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-84968-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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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