Primarily of scholarly interest, though readers with an interest in Middle Eastern geopolitics will find much of value.
A penetrating study of a conflict that, although brief, helped establish a Middle Eastern template that is operational today.
According to Laron (International Affairs/Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem; Origins of the Suez Crisis: Postwar Development Diplomacy and the Struggle over Third World Industrialization, 1945-1956, 2013), the Six-Day War of June 1967 was fairly well settled within hours of its onset. The Israeli air force wiped out the entire air fleet of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq within the first few hours and then, over less than a week, Israel’s army pushed the nation’s borders further out. The war had massive repercussions, shifting power away from Egypt to Palestine and Jordan, and it quickened the rise of Islamist and Baathist forces alike, to say nothing of many local sectarian militias. On the Arab side, the Baathist military wanted border conflicts, if not outright war, with Israel primarily to “wrongfoot Nasser,” as Laron writes of the Egyptian dictator. Internationally, both the United States and the Soviet Union took great interest in a war that by some respects was between them by proxy. The author looks beyond Cold War maneuvering to examine the conflict in other lights, including the economic: none of the nations of the region was doing well, and indeed, as he notes, in January 1967, Egypt had defaulted on loans from the International Monetary Fund. In Israel, too, there was internal tension among factions led by David Ben-Gurion and his rivals, the former of whom had considered the earlier borders as “unbearable” but perhaps was not entirely prepared for the vastly expanded territory. Though readers are left to read between some of the lines, Laron connects many of those events to current trends and developments, including Israel’s “cult of the offensive,” by which Israeli forces strike hard and decisively—and often first, even as the Israeli military “remains the most powerful institution in Israeli society.”
Primarily of scholarly interest, though readers with an interest in Middle Eastern geopolitics will find much of value.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-300-22270-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2017
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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