A skilled, persuasive appraisal of a unique moment in our foreign policy history.
An international affairs expert charts America’s largely unsuccessful foreign interventions over the past 20 years.
Following the end of the Gulf War, with no external challenges to its security or interests and with no threats to the global order and institutions it had fostered since World War II, the United States embarked on a series of costly and ultimately futile missions not so much to defend the West as to extend it politically and ideologically. Because the U.S. had the money and power, because the project seemed viable, and because of the can-do spirit deeply embedded in the country’s traditions, America attempted to protect human rights in China, to encourage Western-style free markets and political institutions in Russia, to intervene for humanitarian reasons and then undertake nation-building in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, to attempt similar transformations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to promote democracy in the Middle East. Mandelbaum (Foreign Policy/Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies; The Road to Global Prosperity, 2014, etc.) takes up each of these initiatives in detail and explains why all these attempts to affect the internal affairs of other nations—historically, emphatically not the business of great powers—miscarried. Whether sponsored by the idealists of the Bill Clinton administration, the so-called realists under George W. Bush, or the personality-driven diplomacy of Barack Obama, all these voluntary undertakings slammed up against hard cultural and political realities that made them impossible. Meanwhile, challenges posed by the likes of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, states that could gravely affect America’s vital interests, only grew. In part because of America’s misadventures, global conditions have changed vastly since 1991, and Mandelbaum sees America’s diplomatic agenda returning to the traditional preoccupations of great powers. Specialists and general readers alike will appreciate his sure historical grasp, evenhanded assignment of fault, careful assessment of shifting domestic political considerations, and understanding of the foreign cultural barriers that so frustrated American intentions.
A skilled, persuasive appraisal of a unique moment in our foreign policy history.Pub Date: April 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-19-046947-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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