An excellent, cleareyed study that does not look for villains but rather lessons for a possible future situation in which “a...
Nearly two decades after the George W. Bush administration’s decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, a political scientist and strategist assesses the many flaws in that plan—and the planners.
In this riveting study, Mazarr (Unmodern Men in the Modern World: Radical Islam, Terrorism, and the War on Modernity, 2007, etc.), associate director of the Strategy and Doctrine Program at the Arroyo Center at the Rand Corporation, sees the ill-fated lunge into war—from the president’s hysterical response to 9/11 to the inability of his senior policy staff to glean the real warnings and risks of failure in the invasion—as less of a nefarious plot to deceive the nation and more of a badly misplaced expression of missionary zeal. The author systematically reviews the criteria of liability for legal negligence by government decision-makers in leading the nation into a costly, senseless war, and he notes how in nearly every instance, they failed in their tasks. Bush’s heedless decision to initiate a “global war on terror” was regarded as a “God-given mission” while he continued to “scoff at deep analysis.” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld arrogantly “did not ensure an adequate consideration of the postwar” issues. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was often sidelined by senior officials and failed to “take the bold actions” to convince the president of serious planning flaws. Secretary of State Gen. Colin Powell simply “had his orders,” and Gen. Tommy Franks assured the president that the military leadership “had a plan” to get in and out quickly, and that “he had the postwar security situation all sewn up.” Mazarr also takes to task members of Congress for lack of due diligence in unearthing “evidence of a brewing fiasco” and the media for failing in its job of providing a check on government power and not “bothering to do much investigation,” especially regarding Hussein’s ostensible possession of nuclear weapons.
An excellent, cleareyed study that does not look for villains but rather lessons for a possible future situation in which “a government is in thrall to a moralistic sense of rightness.”Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5417-6836-9
Page Count: 528
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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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