Meaty reading for policy wonks.
Council on Foreign Relations maven Gelb (Intervention and American Foreign Policy, 2001, etc.) channels Machiavelli in this set of prescriptions and proscriptions on the world beyond America’s shores.
The author’s latest is modeled—thinly—on The Prince, couched in occasional hortatory utterances to “our elected prince.” He is quick to warn, however, that he is not fishing for a job in the Obama administration, since the two dominant political parties “have made me not partisan, but just a bit surly.” In the hands of, say, Kissinger, a Machiavellian take on the world would be truly Machiavellian, but Gelb takes a milder stance. In the place of exhortations to eliminate opponents and their families and sow their fields with salt while denying everything plausibly, Gelb encourages the president to “break the hold of television and particularly cable news on the public debate”; to “be seen as above petty politics”; to fix “dependence on foreign resources such as oil and the mountains of accumulated foreign debt.” That’s all commonsensical, as the subtitle advertises, though none of Gelb’s counsel goes beyond the expected wisdom. Between the too-sparse lists of dos and don’ts come more straightforward glosses, including a tip of the hat to the Kissingerian notion of linkage, which joins two issues that may or may not be related and “adds bargaining power to both.” Gelb demonstrates a clear command of big, gnarly issues, and his overall take on where the elected prince’s principality stands is anything but cheery. Having enumerated countless slips, flaws and flubs, he closes by observing that “we can already see the United States of America…beginning to decline…and on the path to becoming just another great power, a nation barely worth fearing or following.”
Meaty reading for policy wonks.Pub Date: March 17, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-171454-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
