An informative, potentially controversial introduction to the war in Vietnam.
A Vietnam veteran reflects on his experience in this book that’s part memoir and part historical analysis.
The Vietnam War continues to be a hotly disputed subject generations after its conclusion, and it’s often used as a model of military and foreign policy failure. Mastran (Privateer!: Building a Business Reforming Government, 2012), however, proffers a nuanced interpretation that avoids triumphalist revisionism and serves as a thoughtful corrective to the regnant view of U.S. involvement in Vietnam as an intractable quagmire. He divides his book into three sections; the first is devoted to his time as a cadet at West Point, the second to a concise synopsis of Vietnam’s history as a nation, and the third to his service as an officer in the U.S. Air Force during the war. The author, following in his father’s footsteps, encountered austere discipline while at West Point that prepared him to weather the chaos of war in an unfamiliar land. While he was a cadet, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, making it a near-inevitability that he would be sent overseas. He was then sent to Stanford University to get a master’s degree in operations research, and he ultimately worked for the directorate of special weapons in Vietnam. Mastran was part of a special team that worked on “anti-infiltration” technology designed to stop enemy movements in South Vietnam by providing necessary intelligence for bombing raids. He also worked on developing computer-based war-game simulations. Over the course of the book, Mastran weaves his own personal reflections into a wider narrative fabric that includes an account of the United States’ entanglement in Southeast Asia and the Cold War as well as of the partisan politics that dominated discussion of the war on the domestic front. He also furnishes a provocative view of the infamous Tet Offensive as a major military victory and laments what he considers to be the American media’s unfair coverage of the war. Mastran’s analysis is notably restrained and temperate, given his personal involvement, and manages to seamlessly combine a moving remembrance with acute geopolitical insight. Some of his most affecting conclusions reach beyond both arenas into something grander and more philosophical: “I also confirmed that humor could carry me—and others—through any kind of misery, whether at West Point, in Vietnam, or anywhere else.”
An informative, potentially controversial introduction to the war in Vietnam.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5078-0576-3
Page Count: 284
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
