Engaging reading for those interested in foreign policy and military spending.
A 25-year CIA veteran examines how recent presidents have handled the military and defense spending.
As he left office in 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower gave a farewell address in which he warned against the influence of the “military-industrial complex,” theorizing that overinvestment in defense could compromise other domestic issues. Goodman (Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA, 2008, etc.) claims that in the 50 years since that speech, Eisenhower’s warning has gone unheeded, especially by the four most recent presidents: George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The author takes each president to task for his particular failings in foreign policy or his dealings with the military. While the chapter on the second Bush administration and its manipulation of post-9/11 intelligence reports feels slightly rehashed, the chapters on George H.W. Bush (covering the invasion of Panama and Desert Storm and Desert Shield) and Bill Clinton (which addresses “don’t ask; don’t tell,” as well as military incursions into Haiti, the Balkans, Somalia and Rwanda) are engrossing and thoughtful. After examining these four presidents, Goodman includes a chapter on the national missile-defense program, calling it “the most expensive and least effective weapons system in the U.S. arsenal.” This program was introduced during the Ronald Reagan administration (which spent more than $60 billion to develop it), leaving readers to speculate why Reagan was not included as a president guilty of runaway military spending. Goodman waits until nearly the last page before offering “some good news in the overall picture.” He offers a few words of praise for President Obama, who “does understand that the United States is far less exceptional than his opponents believe,” before ending with an ominous reminder: “The age of the superpower is over.”
Engaging reading for those interested in foreign policy and military spending.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-87286-589-1
Page Count: 300
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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 Yorkerstaff 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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