A masterful, fully compelling assessment of key intelligence and special operations missions over recent decades.
The former undersecretary of defense for intelligence under Barack Obama reflects on key military campaigns and the lessons and insights he garnered during his many years of service.
From his early training in the Special Forces to the many high-ranking positions he held within the CIA and the Department of Defense, Vickers had a long, distinguished career that often placed him at the center of some of the most significant military and intelligence operations of the past several decades. In this engrossing, densely packed memoir, the author recounts in vivid detail how these events unfolded and the particular role he played in each instance. He chronicles the U.S invasion of Grenada in 1983, the CIA’s secret assistance to Afghan forces fighting the Soviets in the mid-1980s, the capturing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, and counterterrorist efforts to impede al-Qaida and the Islamic State group. Vickers is successful in his plan to write “an analytical memoir” in order “to provide sufficient historical context for the events in which I participated, show how intelligence, special operations, strategy, and warfare evolved during my more than four decades of service, and how policy battles in Washington often decided the outcome of our operations and wars as much as our action in the field did.” Regarding policy battles, the author candidly scrutinizes how and why decisions were occasionally misguided, when he felt the U.S may not have responded quickly enough or accordingly. Like other recent policy analysts, he contends that the U.S. is enmeshed in a new Cold War, which includes China and Russia, with possibly graver consequences at stake. “Competing successfully in this new era will require far more than military strength,” writes the author. “Our military and intelligence power, moreover, must be transformed to reflect new realities, as must our alliances and national security institutions.”
A masterful, fully compelling assessment of key intelligence and special operations missions over recent decades.Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: 9781101947708
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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