A worldly-wise take on how the US military managed to overcome a tradition of unpreparedness during the post-Vietnam era and decisively win the Gulf War. While Dunnigan (coauthor, From Shield to Storm, 1992, etc.) and Macedonia (a retired colonel and former chairman of the US Army War College's War Gaming Department) focus on the Army, they offer commentary on other branches of our armed forces, beginning with a documentation of ways in which lessons of previous wars invariably have been lost and have had to be relearned over a span of nearly three centuries. The authors note that, initial defeats in North Africa, Korea, and Southeast Asia apart, the introduction of intercontinental missiles with nuclear warheads sharply curtailed the Army's role in military policy following WW II; meanwhile, cold war strategists devoted almost all their attention to the putative threat posed by the Soviet Union in Central Europe. Getting down to business, Dunnigan and Macedonia observe that the Arab/Israeli clash of 1973 helped trigger an internal reform movement in the US military that produced innovative new doctrines on how the Army should operate on a variety of fronts, including the battlefield. The end of the draft, larger defense budgets, and other factors—in particular, more effective training of high-caliber volunteers— also enhanced the Army's capabilities, preparing it to perform with deadly efficiency in the Persian Gulf. Nonetheless, the authors caution that the USSR's collapse and, to some extent, the Desert Storm triumph have created another watershed. If the military is to avoid the setbacks experienced by other victorious armies, they contend, it must identify an uncertain future's likely enemies and reorganize on the shorter rations available to meet these potential foes. Down-to-earth, savvy perspectives on one of the few government enterprises that works and is still equipped to give value for money. (Glossary, plus tabular material throughout)
Pub Date: Nov. 24, 1993
ISBN: 0-688-12096-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1993
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 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
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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