A perceptive appraisal of General Maxwell Davenport Taylor (1901-87), whose public career affords the author (himself a former general) an opportunity to track high-level American decision- making and its consequences in Vietnam during the 1960's. Kinnard served under Taylor when Taylor was Army chief of staff; the author was also granted a dozen interviews and access to his subject's personal papers while researching the overview at hand. Although Kinnard provides enough background information to put Taylor in clear perspective, he does not pretend to provide a conventional biography. Instead, he uses the varied roles the soldier-statesman played in his later years to probe how Washington goes about creating and carrying out geopolitical policy. Having been denied the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs owing to his quarrels with Eisenhower's defense strategies, Taylor retired from the Army and wrote The Uncertain Trumpet, a cold-war tract that stressed the US military's need for flexible response (as opposed to massive retaliation) capabilities. The book provided a welcome blueprint for the Kennedy Administration, and the newly inaugurated President recruited its author as a personal advisor. Believing he needed a win following early setbacks in Cuba and Berlin, JFK initiated the troop buildups that led to a greater American involvement in Indochina's conflicts shortly after his death. LBJ appointed Taylor ambassador to the Saigon regime, and he stayed on as a senior White House counselor when his one-year tour ended. As to the measure of responsibility borne by the steadfastly (albeit thoughtfully) hawkish Taylor for the Vietnam tragedy, Kinnard concludes that his role was central, if not decisive. More an influential soldier than a virtuoso statesman in the author's view, Taylor emerges here as an honest broker whose checkered record of judgments can be faulted largely on what it failed to accomplish. A valuable and illuminating addition to the literature on a wrenching two-front war. (Seventeen photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Aug. 30, 1991
ISBN: 0-08-040581-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
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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