An arguable book, best suited to those who think Vietnam, the Falklands and Iraq were and are just wars.
A thoughtful yet partial history of the rivalry among nations that became a “Special Relationship.”
It was Winston Churchill who brought the phrase “English-speaking peoples” into currency, and Churchill biographer Roberts (Napoleon and Wellington, 2002, etc.) offers a continuation that is appropriately conservative. Britain and America—the English-speaking nations that count the most in the Churchillian scheme of things—have been strong when united, Roberts maintains, whereas they have been subject to disasters (Suez, Dunkirk, Vietnam) when acting independently. The scheme frays a touch when one considers Iraq. Roberts endorses the allied invasion, noting that under Saddam Hussein it was “the world’s leading state-sponsor of terrorism and an openly and oft-declared foe of the English-speaking peoples.” Others, of course, consider it a fiasco, and anti-American Britons have been trotting out a century-old note that the British prime minister is the American president’s poodle. But Roberts is undeterred, elsewhere quoting Horace Walpole’s observation, “No great country was ever saved by good men, because good men will not go to the length that may be necessary.” Great men (and a few women, such as Margaret Thatcher) abound in Roberts’s pages, along with some useless ones; plainly, Roberts has his issues with Edward Heath, “the only British prime minister since the Second World War to doubt the value of the Special Relationship,” who was the first of many leaders to surrender Britain to Europe, a decidedly non-Churchillian arrangement. Readers who weather volleys of opinion will find plenty of useful facts in the mix, touching on such things as the back-stabbings of Suez, the comparative scarcity of medals for bravery in World War II vis-à-vis the 19th century, the support of pro-Reagan Western states for the Equal Rights Amendment and Harold Wilson’s Nixonian penchant for bugging his political opponents. Yet the case always turns back to the manifest destiny of the English-speaking peoples to lead the world, and on the cheap, too, for Roberts argues that the present Iraq war is “one of the cheapest engagements of its kind in the past century”—a statement that is questionable on several fronts, not least of them statistical.
An arguable book, best suited to those who think Vietnam, the Falklands and Iraq were and are just wars.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-087598-4
Page Count: 752
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© 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.
