A provocative argument that runs counter to popular sentiment and conventional wisdom.
Why a strong, interventionist America remains the world’s best hope against the return of international chaos.
Washington Post columnist and Brookings Institution senior fellow Kagan (The World America Made, 2012, etc.), who served in the State Department during the 1980s, sees the United States in retreat from its responsibility at a time when its leadership is needed most. “If Obama’s policies put a dent in the liberal world order, Trump’s statements and actions have been driving a stake through it,” he writes. “For if the United States cannot be relied upon to provide the secure environment in which members of the liberal world order can flourish, and if in addition it is going to be jealous and spiteful and demand ‘wins’ when they do flourish, then the United States starts to look more like a rogue superpower than a nation defending any order of any kind.” The 20th century elevated America into a unique position through a combination of the country’s ideals and power and geography; to abdicate that position, argues Kagan, would be to fall from “a relative paradise” into a natural disorder of darkness and chaos. In the wake of Vietnam and Iraq, both of which the author sees as strategically sound if unfortunate in outcome, America is less likely to see its responsibilities extend beyond its borders. If America pulls back, Russia, Japan, China, Germany, or another nation might rush to fill that vacuum. Peace isn’t a given, and neither is democracy; they must be guarded and defended. Kagan’s argument should appeal to unrepentant Cold Warriors and to others who believe that might makes right where America’s place in the world is concerned. Yet the metaphor for the title is unfortunate, implying (more strongly than the text does) that without the primacy of developed nations, the hordes of barbarians will infest the planet with their jungle ways.
A provocative argument that runs counter to popular sentiment and conventional wisdom.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52165-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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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