by Gregory Daddis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 2, 2017
Solid scholarly history that should arouse spirited arguments among historians and will also appeal to a wider audience.
A historical revision of the last few years of the Vietnam War.
In this fine, thoroughly argued book, Daddis, the director of Chapman University’s MA Program in War and Society and the author of two well-regarded books on the war (Westmoreland's War: Reassessing American Strategy in Vietnam, 2014, etc.), tackles the relatively understudied final years. He engages with a revisionist theory that emerged a few years after America’s withdrawal from the war, an argument that took a handful of different forms. For these revisionists, who tended to be defenders of the war and its legacy, the U.S. did not lose the war but rather lost the peace—or if it did lose the war, it was not a military defeat but a political one caused by weak-willed politicians who refused to carry through on the military’s pending victory. At the heart of this “better war” narrative is the changing of the military leadership in the wake of the 1968 Tet Offensive as Gen. Creighton Abrams led the U.S. forces away from the failed policies of Gen. William Westmoreland. In reasoned prose, Daddis, a retired Army colonel who served in both Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom, eviscerates this revisionist argument. He takes readers methodically through the realities of Vietnam from spring 1968, showing how the change in strategy was not that profound in terms of its impact on the ground, that the separation of military from political policies represents a false dichotomy, and, perhaps most importantly, that the argument that the military could have won the war had the politicians only unshackled the military utterly ignores, among other elements, the agency of the Vietnamese people. Furthermore, the author reveals how the “better war” argument has real, modern-day ramifications, manifesting in equally flawed arguments about Gen. David Petraeus’ so-called “surge” in Iraq in 2007.
Solid scholarly history that should arouse spirited arguments among historians and will also appeal to a wider audience.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-069108-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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 Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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