Of considerable interest to students of military history, strategy, tactics and geopolitics—and useful in making sense of...
A set of essays devoted to the shadowy ground on which the guns have ceased their roar, but could resume it at any moment.
War has its uses, as the various contributors to this anthology show, from the conquest of land and resources to the removal of a threat real or perceived. Editor Moten (History/United States Military Academy) offers a fresh view. The old notion that the end of a war is marked by victory just doesn’t work any more, for today, writes military historian Roger G. Spiller, “you will search in vain for any definition of victory in American military doctrine.” The ideal of victory still exists, of course, but a more pragmatic end seems to be a rather surprising one, at least coming from the pen of a serving officer: “In every war the aims of all sides, no matter how opposed at the beginning, gradually converge toward an agreement to stop fighting.” The rub would seem to be in that word “gradually,” as these essays reveal. Peter Maslowski rebrands the Indian Wars as the “300-Years War,” an eminently sensible take on the matter. Theodore Wilson looks at the Cold War as an extension of World War II, with peace not really breaking out for generations. The view of conflicts previously considered open and shut becomes more complicated here, with the American victory in the Mexican War coming to look very similar to the supposed “mission accomplished” in the Iraq War, complete with roadside bombs and guerrilla attacks. Some wars go on and on without apparent effect except to tire everyone out, but some have lasting influence—as with the Civil War, which, Joseph Glatthaar writes, transformed the U.S. Army “from a stumbling, inefficient, and ill-disciplined volunteer force into a progressive, sophisticated, efficient war-making machine.” Other contributors include Andrew Bacevich, Ira Gruber and Roger Spiller.
Of considerable interest to students of military history, strategy, tactics and geopolitics—and useful in making sense of the headlines, too.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9461-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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