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 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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