Brilliant journalism that offers a deeply disquieting commentary on America’s dysfunctional cultural divide.
A war story focused on “a generation of elite fighters who in the absence of any clear end to conflict, had to decide what the hell they were fighting for.”
Perhaps the most prominent American special forces unit, the SEALs enjoy a large readership for the steady stream of books recounting their exploits. This disturbing but gripping account by award-winning New York Times correspondent Philipps will appeal to a large audience but few SEAL admirers. Readers may remember the 2019 trial of veteran SEAL Eddie Gallagher for war crimes, including a 2017 murder in Mosul, Iraq. After a review of SEALs history, training, and operations in Iraq, Philipps delivers the result of years searching confidential Navy documents, court transcripts, service and medical records, thousands of text messages and emails, and interviews with current and former SEALs. They testified to Gallagher’s erratic and dangerous conduct, which included not just murder, but lying to superiors, theft, narcotic addiction, sniping at obviously innocent civilians, and putting their own lives in danger by inexplicably foolish tactics. But the trial ran in parallel with a media blitz that described a “blue-eyed combat veteran jailed by his own government….Eddie was a real-life version of Rambo made for the Trump era.” Fawning TV spots portrayed him as an old-school warrior “just trying to do what needed to be done when he was tattled on by pouty, politically correct millennials.” Perhaps aware of how the winds were blowing, many SEALs who had complained to superiors waffled on the witness stand or never appeared. In the end, Gallagher was convicted of one minor charge and immediately pardoned by Trump, who proclaimed that he was exactly the sort of warrior that would make America great. He also fired Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer when, with the approval of SEAL and military brass, he sought to discipline Gallagher, who remains a regular on Fox News and other conservative media.
Brilliant journalism that offers a deeply disquieting commentary on America’s dysfunctional cultural divide.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-23838-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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