An authoritative history showing the perils of “selective vision of people in power.”
A comprehensive history of the late stages of the Vietnam War.
Eisenberg, a professor of U.S. history and foreign relations, is nothing if not thorough in her coverage of the nasty politics, frustrating diplomacy, and stormy homefront. She makes regular detours to the battlefield but emphasizes the roles of two larger-than-life American leaders—Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger—who aimed to bring matters to a satisfactory conclusion and failed. The author draws on a vast amount of declassified documents, “an avalanche of material about [the Nixon] presidency that has appeared over the previous fifteen years,” offering “more insights into the foreign policy operations of an administration than we are likely to see again.” Eisenberg, a veteran scholar of the era, delivers these insights in mostly lucid prose, creating a meticulously researched narrative about a deplorable episode in American history that, with more information, becomes even more deplorable. Nixon took office in 1969 with the promise of ending U.S. involvement in Vietnam. A few years later, the last American soldier had left, but even readers who experienced that period will squirm at Eisenberg’s expert account of how it happened. Although she cuts away regularly to the war, this is mostly a geopolitical history emphasizing the actions of Nixon and Kissinger, his pugnacious national security adviser. Both agreed with military leaders that North Vietnam would accept a satisfactory peace only in response to painful losses on the battlefield. At the same time, Nixon announced that troop withdrawals would begin immediately, infuriating the military but pleasing Congress, the media, and the widespread anti-war movement. This mixed message failed to discourage the North Vietnamese, and Eisenberg’s compelling yet painful text never fully explains why Nixon and Kissinger persisted for four years in a policy guaranteed to fail—at the cost of another 20,000 Americans and “between one and two million Asians,” mostly civilian and innocent.
An authoritative history showing the perils of “selective vision of people in power.”Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-19-763906-1
Page Count: 632
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
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
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
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