A vital primer to the slow-motion conflagration of American foreign policy.
Precise narrative connects the dots between Vietnam and Gulf War II, primarily from a political and diplomatic perspective.
Gardner (History/Rutgers Univ.; Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam, 1995, etc.) combines a keen grasp of sprawling subject matter with a non-ideological stance (though he’s impatient with foolish politicians) and a controlled, accessible writing style that’s sometimes even droll. While many observers claimed the Cold War’s end also meant “the end of history,” he takes a more jaundiced, long-term view: “Despite the shock of 9/11…both Gulf Wars were long in the making.” Gardner argues that the architecture for America’s current situation derives from the Vietnam era, in terms of the elevated goals our government often has for armed interventions relative to what actually transpires. He bolsters this claim by examining the careers of key statesmen, including national-security advisors Walt Rostow, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft. The author tracks how these individuals responded to their presidents, the military and other factors in translating passionately held views into policies with unpredictable ramifications. Rostow, progressive in many ways, saw the communist threat in Asia as paramount and yearned for a conventional war (instead of a counterinsurgency) to deliver an emphatic “knockout blow” to this ideology. Brzezinski correctly predicted that Afghanistan would be the USSR’s Vietnam, but he misjudged the devastating blowback from the Carter administration’s support for Iran’s hated shah. Scowcroft and the first President Bush, foreign policy “realists,” judiciously addressed the first Gulf War yet set the stage for America’s current disastrous involvement. Throughout, Gardner weighs how the historical bogeyman of the Cold War conflicted with domestic political concerns to cause perpetual shortsightedness regarding the Middle East in general and the threat of non-state terrorism in particular. He gradually builds to a devastating conclusion: that the second Iraq war transformed the military, “with consequences that changed the very conception of a citizen army in a democracy, raising questions about whether the new military could be controlled by civilian authority.”
A vital primer to the slow-motion conflagration of American foreign policy.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59558-075-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
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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