A well-executed and dispiriting study of imperial overreach and cultural collision.
Former BBC journalist Loyn turns a gimlet eye on the war in Afghanistan, the longest in the history of the U.S.
“This is not a failed nation but a nation that has been failed,” writes Loyn, who was on hand for many significant moments of the war. Afghanistan has been failed, he enumerates, by a confused military doctrine. American forces invaded on the premise that it was best to fight and get out rather than engage in nation-building; the U.S. saw itself “not as an imperial invader but a force for good, spreading enlightenment and democracy.” Some of the other coalition forces were less sure: A German senior officer sharply reminded an American commander that only part of the job was military, the rest political, while “British troops went into Iraq and Afghanistan with a confident swagger, believing that centuries of imperial experience made them uniquely well suited to the complex work required.” As it is, writes Loyn, the U.S. forces turned out to be the more effective, though there was plenty of learning to be done. They had little idea of the political and ethnic makeup of the country and not much sense that they had to focus on stabilizing the country for the great mass of the people as well as on destroying the Taliban, who could have been neutralized early on, given better handling. On that score, Loyn charges that the Taliban were willing to surrender, but Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. secretary of defense and manager of the war, rejected the offer. While early U.S. commanders asked Rumsfeld to sideline coalition forces, later ones came to rely on their allies, only to fear “a domino effect, where other nations followed France and pulled out early.” Loyn’s pages are steeped in tragic misinterpretation and always with a sympathy for ordinary people who deserved much better.
A well-executed and dispiriting study of imperial overreach and cultural collision.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-12842-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
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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