So-so, even good in spots. Overall, though, for those inclined to a Jane-was-right view of a still-divisive war.
As the title promises, a leftist (though not especially doctrinaire) reading of the 20-plus-year American misadventure in Southeast Asia.
In this volume in the New Press People’s History Series, modeled on the work of historian Howard Zinn, novelist/playwright Neale offers interpretations of the war that range from the stunningly simplistic to the satisfyingly nuanced. His middle-school-textbookish overview of events abounds in the former: “As long as the Vietnamese peasants could grow enough rice to live, they did not have to work for the low wages that business and industry wanted to pay.” “One reason [the American ruling class] intervened in Vietnam was that if they simply accepted a Communist victory there it would have weakened anti-Communism at home.” Neale (The Laughter of Heroes 1993, etc.) deepens his views as he progresses, however, and turns up episodes that other histories gloss over or miss altogether: the string of minor coups, for example, that followed the Kennedy-era ouster of the Diem government, installing Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky (“Both were corrupt in all the usual bribery and export-import ways. But both were also heavily involved in the heroin trade”), and the widespread resistance among American soldiers to the war, both at home and on the front. Neale is particularly strong on this second matter, turning up little-documented mutinies in places like Fort Bliss, Texas, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina, as well as an astonishingly high incidence of “fraggings” throughout South Vietnam. So thorough is his account of such events that one wishes he had devoted his book to what he calls “the GIs’ Revolt”—though without such unhelpful asides as: “The GIs could often see that they were workers oppressing other poor people,” a sentiment guaranteed to tick off just about any veteran, to say nothing of historians.
So-so, even good in spots. Overall, though, for those inclined to a Jane-was-right view of a still-divisive war.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56584-807-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
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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