A chilling cautionary tale of Orwellian repercussions.
A somber examination of why the war on terror has stretched over 15 years and appears to have no end in sight.
Fear has created what Danner (Journalism and English/Univ. of California; Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War, 2009, etc.) calls the sense of “permanent emergency” among the American public and administration alike in keeping the wars in the Middle East percolating. In this poignant, thoughtful plea for accountability and a change of course, the author shows how the terrorists, specifically al-Qaida and the Islamic State group, have succeeded spectacularly in their aims of drawing Americans into a “forever war.” He begins with 9/11 and the emergency measures put in place immediately under the administration of George W. Bush, starting with Congress’ Authorization for Use of Military Force and the Patriot Act. Privately, there were presidential memorandums empowering the CIA to proceed with “the capture and detention of Al Qaeda terrorists” and the military order on the “detention, treatment, and trial of certain non-citizens in the war against terrorism,” redefining the captured as “detainees” and “unlawful combatants” rather than “prisoners of war” and thus ineligible for protections by the Geneva Convention statues. From Bush’s creation of this “state of exception”—defined as a time during which, “in the name of security, some of our accustomed rights and freedoms are circumscribed or set aside”—President Barack Obama has “normalized” it, despite his best intentions: “This is not who we are.” Danner emphasizes the irony of this ongoing “secret war”—which he compares to Argentina’s Dirty Wars of the 1970s—by the Nobel Prize–winning president, who cannot close Guantánamo or repeal AUMF and whose “light footprint” strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan includes targeted killings by drones and other “expansive use of the power of secrecy.” Only through politics and education can we dispel the “twilight world” of perpetual war in which we are mired.
A chilling cautionary tale of Orwellian repercussions.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4776-7
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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