Is Europe ripe for the plucking? Perhaps. Sheehan offers a worthy contribution to geopolitics.
Europeans and Americans inhabit different planets—certainly, Sheehan (History/Stanford Univ.) writes, when it comes to attitudes toward war.
Sheehan’s solid book addresses an interesting phenomenon: How is it that Europe, breeding ground for catastrophic wars, has adopted the view that the military is a largely unnecessary evil? One factor, the author suggests, is the changing view of the nation-state. Whereas wars created and reinforced nations, and universal military service was once seen as a means for inculcating the ideals of the state, ever since 1945 supranational organizations, such as the UN and World Court, have assumed some of the state’s old duties. Britain had already proved that it was possible to be an only modestly militaristic state and yet control a vast empire. Now, with the postwar loss of empires around the world, Europe’s nations no longer needed great armies. (Besides—though Sheehan does not address it at any length—much of the postwar defense tab was being paid by the United States, eager to contain the Soviet Union via NATO, whose mission, a British diplomat remarked, was to “keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”) However Europe arrived at its new view of force, wars fought on the continent have been remarkably well-contained. As Sheehan observes, a war in the Balkans would once have touched off a conflagration across the continent, but the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s were local and, once NATO got involved, easily suppressed. Any increase in militarism seems unlikely, given the widespread renunciation of America’s invasion of Iraq, though the balance may be thrown off once militarized Turkey joins the European Union. Sheehan warns that it will “not be an easy matter to absorb this kind of state into Europe’s resolutely civilian politics and culture.”
Is Europe ripe for the plucking? Perhaps. Sheehan offers a worthy contribution to geopolitics.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-618-35396-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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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