A provocative survey of a changing military charged—it seems ever more apparent—with making the world American, regardless...
Prolific world-traveler Kaplan (Mediterranean Winter, 2004, etc.) goes where the boots are. And where they are, he suggests, there stands the American Empire.
“The Big Army doesn’t understand that force protection means force projection. They’re killing us in Iraq because they see that we’re scared.” Thus a Special Forces soldier in Afghanistan, speaking with the customary openness of soldiers in the face of someone they trust—Kaplan, in this case, who over the years has been along for many rides when the bullets are flying and who, at one point, catches himself wondering what for: “I was fifty-one years old. Why was I doing this?” He answers by bringing home absorbing stories from warriors at the edges of the empire, who are somehow different from soldiers in past wars: For them, all the world is “Injun Country,” monitored by “singular individuals fronting dangerous and stupendous landscapes.” Indeed, the troops who patrol the streets of Djibouti and scout the jungles of Colombia and the Philippines look like surfers, talk like cowboys and have a healthy disdain for the meaningless regulations of the Big Army. But, in the parlance, they’re exquisitely sensitive to the mission, which has changed markedly since 9/11, involving a newfound resolution “to whack people quietly” while trying to win hearts and minds. The Big Army, of course, does things more noisily, though its middle managers—the captains and majors who run the show, “the true agents of the imperium”—seem keen to remake the organization for an ever-unpredictable world. Those who question whether or why the U.S. is an imperial nation will not be comforted by Kaplan’s assurances that, after all, “Rome, Venice, and Britain were the most morally enlightened states of their age”—and that democracy at home and a ruthless authoritarianism abroad are not necessarily incompatible.
A provocative survey of a changing military charged—it seems ever more apparent—with making the world American, regardless of the world’s view of things.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-6132-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
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
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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