Despite flaws, this is an incisive critique of American policy from the standpoint of an earlier era but with troubling...
A call for the United States to return to its traditional foreign policy based on "neutrality, non-intervention, and non-entanglement."
Foreign policy scholar Hendrickson (History/Colorado Coll.; Union, Nation, or Empire: The American Debate over International Relations, 1789-1941, 2009, etc.) bemoans the nation's departure from the classic liberal principles that guided its foreign policy before 1945, and he delivers a blistering critique of the results. While conceding that collective action was necessary in the 1930s, the author considers that doctrine today as "a standing temptation to intervention throughout the globe" under a variety of pretexts. Combined with the expectation of unchallenged American military supremacy and a surveillance regime enabled by new technologies, current policies have eroded personal liberty while delivering neither peace nor security but rather a state of permanent crisis. Hendrickson calls out government pretensions to be enforcing a global rules-based order as self-serving nonsense, and he rejects a characterization of earlier policies as isolationist, contending that they would actually foster more trade and honest engagement with other countries than our current approach involving expansive alliances, foreign bases, electronic spying, and economic sanctions. Far better, he asserts, to return to a policy that fully respects the sovereignty of all other nations and stays out of involvement in their internal affairs. While the author makes telling points and raises uncomfortable questions, his translation of principles into recommended action proves more disturbing. He appears to support an effective withdrawal from other great powers' spheres of influence, abandoning the Baltic republics and Taiwan to the mercy of their great neighbors, and he would leave South Korea to defend itself against Pyongyang. Justifying his positions on Korea and the Middle East even leads him into disingenuous misrepresentations; in his zeal to argue against interventions, he appears far too eager to make needless excuses for vile dictators.
Despite flaws, this is an incisive critique of American policy from the standpoint of an earlier era but with troubling implications in the unlikely event that it actually gains traction in Washington, D.C.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-066038-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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