A precise military study, only marginally adapted for a general reader.
The man who formed the first US special-tactics unit makes a clear, detailed, clinical analysis of operations from the failed Iranian rescue mission to the recent successes in Afghanistan.
In 1977, Carney, an Air Force officer, was chosen to lead a six-man team nicknamed Brand X. Created to fight terrorism, the unit trained to combat hijackings, rescue hostages, and recover stolen nuclear weapons. Skilled in HALOs (high altitude, low opening parachute jumps), Brand X could secure, clear, and light landing fields for Navy SEALs and the Army Delta Force and Rangers. With journalist Schemmer (The Raid, not reviewed), Carney evaluates US special operations since 1980, most of which he took part in. The Iranian hostage rescue failed for multiple reasons, including no dress rehearsal, unfamiliarity with low-level desert flight, and branch service compartmentalization that lead to non-sharing of critical information. President Reagan called the 1983 invasion of Grenada a brilliant victory, but Carney shows it to have been a messy affair resulting in multiple deaths by friendly fire. Better success came with the 1989 invasion of Panama to depose Manuel Noriega, when Brand X safely coordinated multiple air strikes and drops in a confined area. In the Gulf War, General Schwarzkopf led with a huge tank assault; special forces played only a limited role, its purpose to soothe the Israelis by clearing Scud missiles from western Iraq. Retired by the time of Afghanistan, Carney appreciates the way special units organized the anti-Taliban forces there, making unnecessary large numbers of US ground troops. Carney trained as a chef after leaving the service and later joined the private sector as a military consultant. He ends with an affecting appeal for donations to a scholarship fund for children whose fathers died in special-forces operations.
A precise military study, only marginally adapted for a general reader.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45333-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
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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