A dense but ultimately illuminating inquiry into the psyche of our fighting men and women.
Cogent, scholarly essays on moral conflicts soldiers have faced throughout history but especially today.
Philosopher, psychoanalyst and ethicist Sherman (Philosophy and Ethics/Georgetown Univ.; Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind, 2005, etc.) marshals all three specialties to explore a subject often passed over by traditional philosophers, who focused narrowly on the justice of going to war, and contemporary experts, who emphasize its psychiatric trauma. The author emphasizes that soldiering is less a career than an identity, different from but never detached from civilian life. Military leaders throughout history have worked hard to inspire a warrior attitude in their troops, who rarely hesitate to display intense comradeship and eagerness to fight. Sherman adds that, until the Vietnam War, experts ignored the painful moral burden soldiers feel when exposed to battle, a feeling they often bring back to civilian life and never escape. Seeing comrades die through no fault of their own can trigger a persistent “survivor’s guilt” as soldiers struggle to recognize that luck, not skill or teamwork, has preserved them intact. Despite the universal acceptance of post-traumatic stress disorder, which has always existed, the Pentagon refuses to grant victims a Purple Heart, so many still consider PTSD a shameful affliction. According to the author, one culprit is stoicism, an ancient philosophy that, in the oversimplified version popular among officers, teaches that a truly wise man is indifferent to suffering. Sherman fills her academic study with interviews, anecdotes and historical examples in an often successful effort to make it accessible to general readers.
A dense but ultimately illuminating inquiry into the psyche of our fighting men and women.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-393-06481-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
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
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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