Psychotherapist LeShan (The Dilemma of Psychology, 1990, etc.) digs into the causes of—and cures for—war. LeShan rejects all conventional explanations for the existence of war, including those based on genetic inheritance (as championed by Robert Ardrey), innate destructive tendencies (Freud), lust for power (Nietzsche), or economic gain (Marx). War, LeShan believes, springs from the tension between two conflicting psychological drives: our desire for individuation, and our need to be part of a group. LeShan contends that only mystical experience or war can reconcile these drives; obviously, war is much more popular. But how do ordinary men and women get enticed into war? According to LeShan, we pass our lives in various ``modes'' of perception; the most significant here are the ``sensory,'' in which we see the world through common sense, and the ``mythic,'' ruled by irrationality. In most wars, the mythic mode prevails: A complex situation becomes black-or-white; the enemy becomes the incarnation of evil; force is the answer. Some wars, however, remain in sensory mode and never capture the public imagination, Vietnam being the prime case. Given this analysis, what can we do? LeShan urges self-awareness, so that we can see when we are slipping into mythic mode (as happened in the Gulf War). He also advises better education, so children can find peaceful expression for their mythic impulses; recognition of the ways in which war is used to solve personal problems; and a full-scale study of governmental structures, to discover whether they can be redesigned to wage peace. An intelligent study that offers a glimmer of hope (if war depends upon perception, then it can be curtailed if not eradicated)—although, truth be told, LeShan's admonitions will probably have all the effect of lighting a match in a hurricane.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-879360-20-9
Page Count: 163
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
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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