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LYNDON JOHNSON AND THE WARS FOR VIETNAM

An accidentally timely rejoinder to Robert McNamara's recently published memoir. Historian Gardner (Rutgers; Spheres of Influence, 1993, etc.) traces the trajectory of the Vietnam War from a small-scale police action to a full-scale (but undeclared) conflict, showing how its conduct coincided with Lyndon Johnson's attachment to New Dealera programs meant to improve the lives of the downtrodden. Johnson's making the war an international expression of Great Society ideals of freedom and prosperity, Gardner demonstrates, introduced entangling political elements into a military problem and cast a certain unreality on the whole affair: ``If one could go to the moon,'' Gardner imagines a loyalist reasoning, ``and if one could help grandma with new medical miracles, surely it would be possible to convince Ho Chi Minh to accept a dam on the Mekong River instead of a residence in Saigon.'' Manipulated by Rusk and McNamara, Johnson consistently valued bad advice over good, believing that his schemes of regional economic development would bear him out as a savior of the world's oppressed. So strong was this conviction that an advisor said, ``The president is prepared to stake everything on this vision of what we can bring about in Southeast Asia''whether Southeast Asia asked for it or not. The well-known result of the president's hubristic gamble was disastrous: civil unrest and the erosion of confidence in the American way of life, to say nothing of a military defeat far from home. And, as the protagonist in Robert Stone's novel Dog Soldiers puts it, ``What a bummer for the gooks.'' Gardner's suggestion that Vietnam was in some measure a moral drama played out in the dark recesses of LBJ's conscience is an intriguing, controversial contribution to the ongoing debate on the war, one that he backs up with thorough research and sound scholarship.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995

ISBN: 1-56663-087-8

Page Count: 640

Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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