Into the wild blue yonder with Clancy as a knowledgeable, even solicitous, escort. As he did in earlier disquisitions on the silent service (Submarine, 1993) and armored cavalry, the author of bestselling technothrillers offers a detailed handbook on one of America's nonpareil military units. Before getting down to brass tacks on the outfit in question (the Air Force's 366th Composite Wing), however, he provides a detailed survey of air power from the time a venturesome Italian pilot first bombed Libyan rebels in 1912 down to the Star Wars present. His crash course encompasses aerodynamics, airframes, avionics, ordnance, power plants, radar, sensors, and a host of allied subjects. He assesses the flying machines themselves and covers guidance systems that make smart bombs of general-purpose munitions, electronic countermeasures, antiradiation missiles, and tomorrow's hardware. In the final third of his informed text, Clancy profiles the 366th, an elite group based in Mountain Home, Idaho, which combines tactical fighters, B1-B bombers, and logistical aircraft in a single self-contained wing that can be rapidly deployed to combat zones or trouble spots in the furthest reaches of the world. Having reviewed the 366th's history (which dates back to WW II's European theater) and current operations, he follows the so-called Gunfighters as they participate in a brutally realistic exercise at Nevada's Nellis AFB in 1994. For a crowd-pleasing windup, Clancy calls on his considerable skills as a novelist to deliver a vividly plausible account of how the 366th might be employed during a potentially explosive crisis in Southeast Asia circa 2000. Complete with a wealth of line drawings, maps, and photos, verbatim interviews with top Air Force officers, and cogent explanations of high-tech hardware and latter-day doctrine, a most attractive package for armchair air marshals or taxpayers interested in what sort of bangs they're getting for their aviation bucks.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-425-14957-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
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
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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