Great battles and strong opinions.
Into the breach once more.
Shelves groan with “famous battles” accounts, and journalist and author Walsh has written another. Although no soldier, he has done his homework, and some military buffs will likely not object to his low opinion of the “politically correct” claim that war “never solves anything” and is shameful and destructive and marks a failure in national leadership. The reality, he maintains, is that war provides a “temporary, and often quite long-lasting, solution to most of the world’s most intractable conflicts.” He adds that war is foundational to every society throughout history. It will “never be abolished, and never lose its attraction for young and virile men.” He emphasizes that war remains a male obsession and that—in a claim that will raise more than a few eyebrows—“any culture that is forced to rely on women in combat is destined to lose.” (He assures female readers that women experience their own epiphany in childbirth.) Walsh then delivers 300 pages on wars from Troy to the present day, showing great admiration for (little surprise) the military tactician Napoleon. His epilogue—“Of the Battle of 9/11”—delivers a summing-up that many readers will suspect is coming. Throughout history, he writes, great nations and great commanders fought to destroy an opponent. There was never a concept of “limited” war, but that has been American policy since 1945, and he loathes it. He points out that since then the U.S. has never won a significant war but has lost several, including the war on terror, and we show no signs of confronting today’s bad actors.
Great battles and strong opinions.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250281364
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
