Fear, boredom, and fatigue are a soldier’s lot, and this is a skillful account of how they have long dealt with it.
Since time immemorial, soldiers have consumed mind-altering substances; Andreas (International Studies/Brown Univ.; Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America, 2013, etc.) delivers an impressive, often unsettling history of six.
Alcohol has inspired soldiers since ancient times. Now frowned upon because it muddles their skills, it still remains popular. Opium has an equally long history and only fell from grace when, highly refined in the 19th century, its addictive properties excited moral condemnation. Nicotine has “lightened the inevitable hardships of war” so well that there were serious campaigns during both world wars to collect cigarettes to send overseas. Only after 1975 were they not included with soldiers’ food rations. The only psychoactive that has never been condemned is caffeine, which has become a 21st-century essential for fighting troops and is not just administered through coffee or soda anymore, but also Red Bull and other energy drinks. Cocaine is not necessarily a soldier’s drug, but its prominence as a target in the war on drugs makes it relevant to Andreas’ study. Fighting illegal drugs is a police matter, but treating it as a war is politically popular and allows vast amounts of money to be spent. The author delivers a painful account of the failed five-decade war on drugs, now mostly directed against cocaine, which has destabilized many Latin American nations, especially Mexico. Cocaine now costs much less than it did decades ago. A product of modern chemistry, the first amphetamines appeared in the 1930s, and their fiercely energizing effect, similar to cocaine but much longer acting, made them the ideal battlefield drug. During World War II, military leaders loved their performance-enhancing qualities, and doctors prescribed enormous quantities, especially during the early years. Although now officially condemned, soldiers value them for duties requiring long periods of alertness.
Fear, boredom, and fatigue are a soldier’s lot, and this is a skillful account of how they have long dealt with it.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-19-046301-4
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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 Yorkerstaff 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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