Laugh-out-loud stories about how the United States failed to rebuild Iraq.
After 2005, the State Department suddenly received orders to reconstruct the country. In the loop after years of neglect, it scrambled to find qualified personnel but never succeeded. The main criteria seemed to be a willingness to live in Iraq for a year at a salary of $250,000 and three paid vacations. A career Foreign Service bureaucrat with a daughter requiring college tuition, Van Buren volunteered. After a hasty “Islam for Dummies” orientation (“dudes kiss, no serving bacon, no joking about God”), he flew to Iraq, collected his helmet, body armor and armed guards (mandatory when off base) and set to work. The author’s hilarious vignettes do not conceal his outrage. “The more projects the better” mantra trumped inconveniences such as market research. A clothing factory opened and quickly closed in the face of far-cheaper Chinese imports. Researchers doubted Iraqis would pay double for fresh chicken what they currently paid for the frozen Brazilian variety, but American contractors built a chicken-processing facility anyway—and proved the researchers right. Easy, feel-good projects were popular, producing cheerful photos of troops giving free stuff to happy kids, while avoiding sullen Iraqi adults observing from afar. Long-term development proved difficult because Iraq’s government refuses to assume salary and maintenance costs once American contractors finish, leaving the nation dotted with empty school, clinics and other facilities. A few moving essays reveal a desperately unhappy nation, but mostly this is a delightful companion to Richard Galli’s classic Vietnam hearts-and-minds satire, Of Rice and Men (2006). One of the rare, completely satisfying results of the expensive debacle in Iraq.
Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9436-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
