A masterful, fully compelling assessment of key intelligence and special operations missions over recent decades.
The former undersecretary of defense for intelligence under Barack Obama reflects on key military campaigns and the lessons and insights he garnered during his many years of service.
From his early training in the Special Forces to the many high-ranking positions he held within the CIA and the Department of Defense, Vickers had a long, distinguished career that often placed him at the center of some of the most significant military and intelligence operations of the past several decades. In this engrossing, densely packed memoir, the author recounts in vivid detail how these events unfolded and the particular role he played in each instance. He chronicles the U.S invasion of Grenada in 1983, the CIA’s secret assistance to Afghan forces fighting the Soviets in the mid-1980s, the capturing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, and counterterrorist efforts to impede al-Qaida and the Islamic State group. Vickers is successful in his plan to write “an analytical memoir” in order “to provide sufficient historical context for the events in which I participated, show how intelligence, special operations, strategy, and warfare evolved during my more than four decades of service, and how policy battles in Washington often decided the outcome of our operations and wars as much as our action in the field did.” Regarding policy battles, the author candidly scrutinizes how and why decisions were occasionally misguided, when he felt the U.S may not have responded quickly enough or accordingly. Like other recent policy analysts, he contends that the U.S. is enmeshed in a new Cold War, which includes China and Russia, with possibly graver consequences at stake. “Competing successfully in this new era will require far more than military strength,” writes the author. “Our military and intelligence power, moreover, must be transformed to reflect new realities, as must our alliances and national security institutions.”
A masterful, fully compelling assessment of key intelligence and special operations missions over recent decades.Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: 9781101947708
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
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
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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