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WHAT HAVE WE DONE

THE MORAL INJURY OF OUR LONGEST WARS

The psychological and moral aspects of war and trauma are not well-understood, and Wood’s book is a welcome contribution to...

A wide-ranging study of the moral costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, costs that are certain to carry over into future conflicts—to say nothing of civilian life.

“The army trained you to fight. It did not train you for psychological shock.” So said a military veteran to Pulitzer Prize–winning Huffington Post correspondent Wood. The author examines a range of related problems, both abstract and concrete, wrought by wars waged against largely unseen, unknowable enemies—with the result that, too often, the foe becomes a preteen with a Kalashnikov. An overarching malady is “moral rot,” which one West Point military ethicist holds to be the logical result of cynicism and corruption at the top, manifested infamously by the Abu Ghraib prison case, less openly by such things as escalating rates of military suicide, mental illness, divorce, and other woes. While field soldiers were “struggling to apply their moral codes to the chaos of combat,” writes Wood, “those above them were blatantly violating the military’s own moral code of values, both to accomplish their mission and for their own career advancement.” Whether career soldiers or single-hitch enlistees, many warriors returning from the fight are afflicted by what is informally called “war trauma,” a cousin of but unlike the better-known PTSD—though it shares with PTSD the resistance of those in the hierarchy to admit such a thing exists in the first place. As Wood notes, Jonathan Shay, a clinical psychiatrist, prefers to call this category of illness “moral injury” rather than disorder, because it places the onus on the afflicted rather than on the agency of being called on to behave unjustly in war and must bear the burden. Killing, even justifiable, exacts a toll on the perpetrator as well as the victim; as one soldier told the author, meaningfully, “you know, I’m not a psychopath.”

The psychological and moral aspects of war and trauma are not well-understood, and Wood’s book is a welcome contribution to the field. A good complement to David Finkel’s Thank You for Your Service (2013).

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-316-26415-0

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

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  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


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  • National Book Award Finalist

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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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