Ought to ratchet the national anxiety meter up a notch, and deflate a few Sunday morning gasbags in the defense industry and...
Now that many feel less sanguine about what may come dropping out of the clear blue sky, Graham, an old hand at reporting military affairs for the Washington Post, provides a balanced and disturbing overview of America’s capacity to protect itself against incoming missiles.
Simply put, a hostile missile shot at the US has good odds of hitting home, or certainly better odds of hitting home than of being intercepted and destroyed. The why of this is also simple: Nobody has the technological know-how to build a functional missile-defense system. Neither an alarmist nor a proponent of either side in the debate, Graham is able to deliver a concise historical survey of the national missile defense program, from its Cold War days right up through the administration of Bush II. Best known of such programs was Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, a.k.a. “Star Wars,” which even had hawks shaking their heads at the utter ridiculousness of its fantasies of space-based interceptors and laser-equipped satellites. As Graham points out, during the Cold War the problems were technological and financial. With the end of the Cold War came new questions about how real the threat was and how pursuing such a missile program would disrupt our international relations. But when North Korea launched a long-distance missile in 1998, potential threats became clear and interest in missile defense was rekindled. Clinton encouraged the defense industries to get cracking, but, Graham is glad to note, he didn't have to worry about abridging the ABM Treaty or “decoupling” from NATO because the issue was at that stage largely theoretical. Vast and varied opinions on the matter notwithstanding, technical feasibility and cost “continue to make the whole endeavor exceedingly challenging if not entirely dubious.”
Ought to ratchet the national anxiety meter up a notch, and deflate a few Sunday morning gasbags in the defense industry and on Capitol Hill.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-58648-086-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
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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