Recommended reading for foreign policy and geopolitics wonks.
Former Secretary of Defense Gates offers a sweeping view of the uses and limitations of American power in the modern era.
The U.S. remains the world’s foremost superpower, notes the author at the beginning, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not challenged at every turn: China is growing economically, with its political influence broadening; Russia “is aggressively threatening and attempting to destabilize Western democracies and dominate its neighbors”; and small states from North Korea to Iraq and Syria remain hot spots even as several NATO members become ever more autocratic. Recent political leaders, Gates holds, have failed to understand and project American power properly, certainly as compared to Eisenhower, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. The author relies on a half-century of service to critique the presidents who have come after them. On the military front, for instance, he urges the application of Bush’s cautious approach to Iraq in the first Gulf War: Define the objectives clearly, bring overwhelming force, and then get out. Career diplomats, though bureaucratized, are essential to the application of nonmilitary power. Economic power constitutes another instrument. Here, Gates takes Trump to task for an isolationist approach that leaves the door open to China to take the place of the U.S.—as it has been with its international infrastructure projects in 60 countries, all intended to hasten the transport of critical resources to China. Other failures are the invasion of Iraq in 2003, although the author disputes the claim that George W. Bush knowingly lied about weapons of mass destruction: “U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies simply were in error, with grave consequences.” Though critics of Gates will dismiss some of his programmatic recommendations—such as, say, don’t replace one dictator with another without a good plan in place—it’s refreshing to see a secretary of defense call for the use of the military as a choice of last resort.
Recommended reading for foreign policy and geopolitics wonks.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3188-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
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
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.
In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.
In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,” he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama’s early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.” The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the race—not just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with “potent disruptor” Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic “birther” campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then “clawing [his] way back to power.” Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama’s cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fractured—surely a topic he’ll expand on in the next volume.
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6316-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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