A whole-earth catalogue of martial cunning that suggests Victorian novelist Francis E. Smedley was at least half right when he decreed that ``all's fair in love and war.'' In a breezy survey more notable for breadth than depth, Dunnigan and Nofi (Shooting Blanks, 1991) offer a series of short, self-contained takes that show why guile ranks among the most effective weapons in any arsenal. Accounts range from how the Israelites employed false retreats in their conquest of Canaan through the ways in which the Allies concealed their capacity to decode Axis radio traffic. Before getting down to ammunition cases, however, the authors provide introductory perspectives on such tricks of the military trade as ambuscades, camouflage, concealment, disinformation, and feints. Having set the scene, they deliver a roughly chronological guide that rambles from the wily warriors of ancient times (Joshua, Alexander, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, et al.) through the havoc indigenous insurgents or outlaws have wreaked on UN peacekeepers in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia. Along their episodic way, Dunnigan and Nofi comment knowledgeably on the practice of deception during the Crusades, several revolutions (including the American), early US campaigns against native American tribes, two global conflicts, and a host of other hostilities, including what the authors call ``the other Gulf War,'' which pitted Iran against Iraq for most of the 1980s. They also cover the sly likes of Cesare Borgia, George Washington, Napoleon, Rommel, two generations of Israeli commanders, and the spymasters who waged most of the Cold War's major battles. Nor do they scant the contributions of technology (advanced or otherwise) to essentially bloodless triumphs in belligerencies down through the ages. Savvy, often sardonic briefings on the consequential role of subterfuge in an enterprise in which, as the old saw has it, truth is the first casualty. (maps, charts, tables)
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-688-12236-1
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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