A devastating critique of U.S. foreign policy regarding a seemingly endless war.
Marine veteran, Atlantic correspondent and assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, West (The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq, 2008, etc.) offers a bleak view of the war in Afghanistan.
“We didn’t have a war-fighting doctrine for defeating the Taliban,” writes the author. “Instead, we had a counterinsurgency doctrine for nation building, much like the Peace Corps on a giant scale.” After a decade of war, the U.S. military has failed its assigned missions of protecting village populations and nation building. Combining policy analysis with on-the-ground accounts of fighting observed during three extended visits in Afghanistan during the past three years, West argues that U.S. military leaders have been wrongheaded and continually failed to face realities. They overlooked “the magnetic power of radical Islam”; treated each village the same, as if the problem consisted of just a few fundamentalists whom village elders could rein in; and tried to convince Afghan tribes to support a corrupt central government. In the Korengal Valley, one of Afghanistan’s most dangerous provinces, Capt. Jimmy Howell told the author: “We’re not making any progress with these people…The insurgents we fight every day are their brothers, sons, uncles. We have to kill enough bad guys and remove their leaders before things will change.” But U.S. military commanders have grown risk-averse, focusing more on providing services and protection to villagers than on killing the enemy. For their part, writes West, the Afghan forces are nowhere near ready to stand on their own. Meanwhile, Taliban forces move freely across the border into Pakistan, which shelters more than 150 insurgent camps. As long as Pakistan plays that role, the war will not end. After making clear the ambiguity and confusion of current American policy, the author writes that America must stay in Afghanistan as long as it takes, learn to fight smarter and neutralize the enemy. He urges reducing conventional U.S. forces and building an advisory task force that can make the Afghan army as battle-ready as the Taliban.
A devastating critique of U.S. foreign policy regarding a seemingly endless war.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6873-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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