An unsparing critique of the US military as well as its industrial and political allies, from a been-there/done-that warrior who sounds off with all the subtlety of an artillery barrage. A highly decorated veteran of the US Army, Hackworth wrote the 1989 bestseller About Face, detailing his experiences in the military and his outrage at America's blunders in Vietnam. The book launched the author on a new career as a military-affairs correspondent for Newsweek, a post that has enabled him to keep a close watch on the armed forces. Hackworth has been in the thick of the action in the Balkans, Haiti, the Persian Gulf, and Somalia. He has also taken unsentimental journeys to Korea and Vietnam, venues in which he earned eight Purple Hearts. The retired colonel's first-person accounts of these battleground sojourns feature hard- hitting observations on the capacities of the US military, plus recollections of his own time as a front-line commander. Proceeding from the premise that the primary responsibility of the armed services is to protect the nation against its enemies, Hackworth lights into political leaders who use the military for diplomatic rather than military purposes. The author also pounds away at the top brass who endorse such errors. Other targets include Pentagon contractors who produce immensely expensive weapons systems of little use in low-tech conflicts, lawmakers who support megabuck procurement programs that promise to create jobs in their electoral districts, and senior officers with a sharper eye for budgetary advantage than for eliminating wasteful duplication. By no coincidence, Hackworth has a thoroughgoing reform agenda, including amalgamating the National Guard with the Reserves, letting NATO die a natural death, gearing up for brushfire belligerencies, merging the USMC into the Army, and encouraging professionalism rather than careerism in the officer corps. Marching orders from an old soldier who's not about to fade away or close ranks. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 3, 1996
ISBN: 0-688-14718-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1996
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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 Yorkerstaff 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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