by George W. Allen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 14, 2001
Plodding and pedantic—but with poignant reminders that the tragedy of Vietnam need not have happened. (3 maps, not seen)
A retired CIA officer describes his considerable involvement in the Vietnam War and offers a somewhat self-serving account of the failure of American policy.
Allen compares himself to Cassandra, and, if his claims here (vetted by the CIA) are even partially true, the comparison is apt. Not long after the 1954 fall of Dien Bien Phu, Allen (and some unnamed colleagues who agreed with him) began offering to military commanders and politicians and diplomatic officers what they considered realistic assessments of the political and military situation in Vietnam, but no one believed them—or even wanted to hear their generally dark predictions. The author begins with a little personal history. Born in 1926, he saw action in the South Pacific during WWII. Afterwards, he joined the new Central Intelligence Agency and became a specialist in Indochinese affairs. He witnessed the increasing Vietnamese involvement of the US in the early 1950s and credits himself with predicting the assault on Dien Bien Phu (no one listened); he warned his superiors in 1954 that the US should not get involved in Vietnam (no one listened); and he saw the Tet Offensive coming (no one listened). During the 1950s and ’60s he was continually in and out of Vietnam—and, at one point, spent two years separated from his family. He believes that one of our principal failures was permitting the communists to win the ideological and psychological battles with the Vietnamese. He describes a chaotic situation during the 1960s and ’70s: There was, he says, no coordinated, integrated plan of intelligence among the military, the CIA, and the South Vietnamese—but there was an insatiable hunger for good news from those US leaders prosecuting the conflict, so the naysayers like Allen were gradually marginalized. Allen is no prose stylist: in his hackneyed text, burrs are under saddles, babies are thrown out with bathwater, and feet are held to the fire.
Plodding and pedantic—but with poignant reminders that the tragedy of Vietnam need not have happened. (3 maps, not seen)Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2001
ISBN: 1-56663-387-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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