edited by Hannah Gurman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2013
These sharp criticisms of the methods and consequences of counterinsurgency campaigns merit serious consideration.
A collection of essays on counterinsurgency highlighting the “cognitive dissonance” in foreign policy of America's refusal to acknowledge the implications of its chosen role as successor to Europe's colonial powers.
Editor Gurman (Foreign Relations/NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study; The Dissent Papers: The Voices of Diplomats in the Cold War and Beyond, 2012) focuses the collection on “the self-serving mythology” that has been the main feature of the doctrine adopted under Gen. David Petraeus in 2006, which justifies ongoing wars while “omitting grimmer details” of the campaigns. The contributors offer different areas of expertise. Gurman's piece on the Vietnam War serves as a kind of conceptual bridge to the essays of historians Karl Hack (The Open Univ., United Kingdom) and Vina A. Lanzona (Univ. of Hawaii, Manoa) on the early Cold War campaigns against communist insurgents in, respectively, Malaya and the Philippines; pieces written by filmmaker Rick Rowley and McClatchy Syria bureau chief David Enders on the Iraq War; and essays on the war in Afghanistan by American history professor Jeremy Kuzmarov and GlobalPost correspondent Jean MacKenzie. Collectively, they present a convincing argument that the Vietnam War subsumed the population-control methods employed in the U.K.'s Malayan campaign and the war against Huk insurgents in the Philippines—relocation and resettlement, food control, collective punishment—under the large-scale deployment of some of the military's most destructive weaponry. This combination of “force and coercion,” as Gurman writers, was also employed in Iraq and Afghanistan “to dislocate the population and dismantle the social structure of the countryside.” The essays trace the legacies of imperial methods, especially British ones, and detail the indigenous populations' responses to those methods.
These sharp criticisms of the methods and consequences of counterinsurgency campaigns merit serious consideration.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59558-825-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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