Best-suited for military-history buffs, but a serviceable account for general readers looking to understand an extremely...
A military-affairs correspondent for USA Today chronicles the story of the fight for Ramadi, Iraq.
By 2006, Ramadi was the country’s most dangerous city, averaging more than 20 attacks per day. Suffering from an ineffectual provincial government and no police force, the population cowered under al-Qaeda control, unprotected by U.S. soldiers, themselves victims of sniper fire and roadside bombs. Charged with quelling the insurgency, the cerebral, introverted Col. Sean MacFarland formed an unlikely alliance with the swashbuckling Sheik Abdul Sattar Bezia al-Rishawi, head of a small tribe fed up with al-Qaeda brutality. Reaching out to other tribes, Sattar, who had lost multiple family members to terrorist attacks, announced a kind of declaration of independence from al-Qaeda—an uprising later dubbed “the Awakening”—and declared his willingness to join the Americans to fight the common enemy. With his command having virtually written off Ramadi, MacFarland chose to overlook Sattar’s unsavory smuggling career and dared to accept this offer that jeopardized the American policy of backing Iraq’s shaky civil government. Michaels, a former Marine infantry officer, explains how these two very different men, working under the radar and against the prevailing narrative that the Iraq war was lost, flipped the populace against the hardcore militants and restored something resembling order to the city. The author sprinkles his account with brief profiles of other military men—particularly the unorthodox Capt. Travis Patriquin, beloved by the Iraqis—who figured prominently in the turnaround, but focuses on the strategy, counterinsurgency principles later institutionalized throughout the country by Gen. David Petraeus. In simple prose occasionally marred by repetition, Michaels explains how taking sides for the tribes was never a matter of ideology but rather of self-interest. Before joining the Americans, they required the demonstration MacFarland so skillfully provided—that American forces would stay and win.
Best-suited for military-history buffs, but a serviceable account for general readers looking to understand an extremely confusing, frustrating war.Pub Date: June 22, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-58746-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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