An intriguing study for students of military culture and mental health.
A challenge to conventional wisdom about the military ignoring PTSD, traumatic brain injury, and suicide among troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Kieran (History, American Studies/Washington & Jefferson Coll.; Forever Vietnam: How a Divisive War Changed American Public Memory, 2014, etc.) never denies the seriousness of PTSD, TBI, and suicide among active and discharged veterans. However, he contends that critics of the military and federal bureaucracy often downplay the complexities of understanding the problems and finding effective solutions. In fact, he contends, implacable anti-war critics have unfairly used the psychological injuries for political ends. “In a climate in which anti-war sentiment was often dismissed with assertions that critics were not supporting the troops,” writes Kieran, “pointing out how the wars were harming those troops facilitated broader policy critiques.” Before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, research about PTSD, TBI, and suicide was based on the premise that deployments would be brief and that the same troops would not be ordered to return to the same war zones multiple times. When the nature of war changed, the military and the Veterans Administration had to recalibrate their policies and their research to react to new realities. As the author points out, those recalibrations take time and don’t usually conform to the urgent needs of combat veterans. Kieran’s research takes readers inside the medical arm of military services and civilian government bureaucracies, showing dedicated researchers and administrators trying to reach consensus about how to treat—and perhaps even prevent—serious mental damage and suicide. The author stresses that the disagreements about how to proceed derive from compassionate advocates relying on science-based research. Kieran rejects the commonly held belief that those in charge of warfare are dismissive of effective treatments for veterans. Throughout, the author provides memorable individual case studies. Much of the book, however, relies on dense academic research and a scholarly writing style, so general readers will need to pay close attention to digest the author’s arguments.
An intriguing study for students of military culture and mental health.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4798-9236-5
Page Count: 404
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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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