A relentlessly admiring portrait of our armed services, but without the traditional overlay of patriotic homilies.
Absorbing continuation of Imperial Grunts (2005), with journalist Kaplan visiting American military forces in another dozen nations as they work to spread the influence of the world’s leading imperial power—a phrase that he insists describes us just as it once did Britain and Rome.
A long chapter follows regular army units patrolling relatively pacified areas in Iraq during 2005. These soldiers embrace “winning hearts and minds” without cynicism, but Kaplan makes it clear they have a crushing task. Surprisingly sophisticated mid-level officers explain that, despite their superior’s proclamations, poor people yearn for security (honest police, a minimum of criminals) more than free elections; then they want work. Most Iraqi insurgents are not religious fanatics but unemployed young men. Fixing this requires patience and money—more of both, Kaplan concludes sadly, than Americans will tolerate. While Imperial Grunts featured army and marine units, this book adds our Air Force and Navy, dazzling high-tech services but run by the same down-to-earth men and women with the same goals: assisting friendly governments, training military forces, providing humanitarian relief and fighting terrorism (a broad term that may include less-friendly political opposition, breakaway insurgents and uncooperative tribes). The chapters on sailors and airmen are less successful; these fighters rarely interact with other nationals, and their consequently simpler views of America’s virtues will make some readers squirm. Sensibly, Kaplan writes mostly on the minutiae of operating extraordinarily complex war machines: nuclear submarines, guided missile destroyers, spy planes. His subjects seem overwhelmingly right-wing and Republican, but units working on foreign soil show a gratifying tolerance as well as a commonsense view of what these nations need that contradicts our leaders’ platitudes about spreading democracy.
A relentlessly admiring portrait of our armed services, but without the traditional overlay of patriotic homilies.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6133-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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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