A conventional but thoughtful illustration of the stupidity of war.
After more than 50 years of writing about military matters, veteran historian Horne (Kissinger: 1973, The Crucial Year, 2009, etc.) reflects on “the common features of warfare that stood out over the ages.”
Concluding that the main common feature is hubris (which the Greeks defined as “the worst sin a leader, or a nation, could commit”), the author makes a convincing, if not original, case by recounting several campaigns from the first half of the 20th century. More than half the book concerns Japan, whose dazzling victory in the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War began with a sneak attack and ended with the annihilation of the Russian fleet. Horne emphasizes the characteristics of the land campaign, a brutal, Pyrrhic victory by poorly equipped but extremely aggressive Japanese forces. No one—the United States included—learned from this. Unhinged by hubris, Japan continued to nibble at Russia until 1939, when Stalin sent large forces that inflicted a crushing defeat in the undeservedly obscure battle of Nomonhan, persuading Japan to turn its attention to Hawaii, the Pacific, and South Asia—an unwise decision. More hubris (“victory disease”) following Pearl Harbor drove it to send a fleet to disaster at Midway. Using Hitler as an example of hubris is a no-brainer, but Horne delivers an admirable account of the 1941 defense of Moscow, the largest battle in history and the true turning point in the war. He concludes with the Korean War, where Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who nearly epitomizes hubris, delivered a masterful performance, and the 1954 French debacle at Dien Bien Phu. The bibliography is invaluable because Horne seems to have read every popular book on these wars. There is little original research, and he rocks no historical boats, but he has lived long and writes well.
A conventional but thoughtful illustration of the stupidity of war.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-239780-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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