A convincing argument that the only enduring harm to America from leaving Iraq will be a trillion-dollar debt and a few...
Not another screed on Iraq, but a well-considered account of what’s likely to happen once we leave.
Mixing psychology with history, Fettweis (Security Studies/Naval War Coll.) writes that both nations and individuals feel the pain of failure more intensely than the joy of success. The North celebrated victory at Appomattox and went back to work; the South seethed for a century. Losing a traditional war pales in comparison to defeat by an ostensibly weak opponent, from the 13 colonies beating Britain in 1783 to the 20th-century humiliations of the French in Algeria, the United States in Vietnam and the Soviets in Afghanistan. To explain the consequences of defeat, Fettweis adopts the language of psychology, which identifies four stages of mourning. Like individuals, nations experience (1) shock and denial, (2) anger, (3) depression, and finally (4) acceptance. America is already passing through Stage 1 as supporters frantically assert that we are winning and that only weaklings, leftists, terrorist sympathizers and the media disagree. Great nations foolishly persist fighting unwinnable wars, proclaiming that withdrawal would lead to catastrophe. Thus, our leaders assert that to “cut and run” would embolden terrorists, reduce America to an object of contempt in world eyes and lead to genocide in Iraq. Fettweis points out that identical predictions about Vietnam (substituting communism for terrorism) were not fulfilled, and he makes a persuasive case that these disasters are extremely unlikely. Defeat by a contemptible opponent traumatizes a nation. Weak systems may fail—Afghanistan pushed the Soviet Union over the edge—but most do fine. America recovered from Vietnam, France thrived after abandoning Algeria, Britain flourished without America. Ironically, North Vietnam, Algeria and the fledgling United States did not fare nearly as well.
A convincing argument that the only enduring harm to America from leaving Iraq will be a trillion-dollar debt and a few thousand dead.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-393-06761-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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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