A single-minded interpretation of the Vietnam War based on the author’s conviction that the conflict’s overriding issue was a Moscow-directed international communist conspiracy. Retro cold warrior Lind (author of the novel Powertown, 1996, as well as works of nonfiction), resembling an intellectual Rambo, verbally machine-guns Vietnamese, Russian, and Chinese communists, along with Americans who had any sympathies with them—everyone, in short, who disagrees with his proposition that the Vietnam War boiled down to a contest of American-led Western good versus communist evil. One purpose of this impassioned book is “to set the historical record straight,” Lind says. But he only occasionally practices the historian’s craft in this often shrill tome. Some sections’such as an examination of regional and ethnic influences in the antiwar movement—are well researched, backed up with solid sources, and convincingly argued. But too much here is made up of conjecture and opinion and venomous attacks, not only on Chairman Mao, Joseph Stalin, and Ho Chi Minh, but on Western journalists, historians, government officials, and members of Congress who had anything positive to say about communists. He further weakens his case by calling for censoring the media in future US wars and for “prosecuting American citizens whose actions bring them under the constitutional prohibition of providing ‘aid and comfort to the enemy.’ “ The latter is a thinly veiled smear against the radical left of the Vietnam War peace movement. On the other hand, Lind convincingly undermines the right-wing “stab in the back” theory that holds that the US military could have defeated the North Vietnamese if politicians hadn’t tied the military’s hands. Lind also correctly pegs Richard Nixon’s Vietnam War policymaking as “a resounding failure in every way.” But the author subverts his cause by presenting too many complex issues in oversimplified, good-versus-evil, terms. Much sound and fury signifying little more than a reprise of John Foster Dulles-like Cold War thinking.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-84254-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
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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