An astute view of America’s enthusiastic but often-unrealistic attitude toward those who fight its wars.
Despite the title this is not a battle history but a thoughtful account of how America treats its soldiers.
From the time of the Revolution, Americans have eulogized our fallen warriors. Sadly, lauding those who die for their country is easier than supporting the survivors, and many still argue that defending America is every citizen’s duty to be carried out with no thought of reward. This opinion was never unanimous, but it was not until 1818 that Congress approved pensions for needy but nondisabled veterans. Pensions for Union veterans followed the Civil War, an expensive proposition. During the 1920s, with many Civil War survivors still collecting, veterans received nearly 20 percent of the federal budget. World War II marked the last gasp of the citizen-soldier myth. One result was the last New Deal entitlement program—the GI Bill of rights, which provided massive educational, medical, unemployment and loan benefits. By 1950 it was the largest entitlement program in history (Social Security eventually surpassed it). Since then Congress has expanded it, and no Republican dares call it socialism. Ironically, the other result is that, as our all-volunteer soldiers grew less representative of the average citizen with the draft’s end in 1973, Americans have come to revere them as the defenders of freedom. The downside is that Congress (20-percent veteran compared to 80 in 1975) tends to exert less authority over the military and acquiesce in our presidents’ increasingly aggressive use of force until long after it’s clear that matters are not going well.
An astute view of America’s enthusiastic but often-unrealistic attitude toward those who fight its wars.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61039-072-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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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