by Julian E. Zelizer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 5, 2010
A timely analysis of the forces that will collide as President Obama ponders the way forward in Afghanistan.
Wide-ranging examination of the nexus between domestic politics and foreign policy during the past 60 years.
In 1940, Franklin Roosevelt urged his countrymen to turn America into “the great arsenal of democracy,” supplying the necessary weapons to defeat the Nazi threat. Within a year the United States fully entered World War II and subsequently devised numerous policies and institutions that abided for decades, creating a national-security state whose contours have always been shaped by domestic politics. Zelizer (History and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.; New Directions in Policy Issues, 2005, etc.) organizes his detailed survey around four themes: the ongoing battle between congress and the president for control of national-security policy; the constant jockeying between Democrats and Republicans for a national-security electoral advantage; the recurring debate about how big and powerful the national government should be; and the persistent controversy over unilateral vs. multilateral action. The author makes clear that moments of bipartisan coalition have been rare. Instead, ideological, electoral and institutional battles are the rule where the demands of a democracy and superpower status often conflict. Marching through the decades since WWII, Zelizer reminds us of episodes that have set off foreign-policy debates—the major wars, of course, but also now dimly remembered disputes over who lost China, the so-called missile gap with the Soviet Union, the rise of the military-industrial complex, the utility of détente and the wisdom of the nuclear-freeze movement. He skillfully charts the debate over various illustrative issues—defense spending, human rights abroad, first-amendment rights at home—and his discussion of the draft, which once intimately connected the average citizen to the national-security state, is particularly fine.
A timely analysis of the forces that will collide as President Obama ponders the way forward in Afghanistan.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-465-01507-8
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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