An account of an event that deserves better investigation.
An impassioned critique of the handling of the Haditha massacre by U.S. Marines on Nov. 19, 2005.
Preferring the term “incident” rather than “massacre,” and comparison to the My Lai massacre in Vietnam notwithstanding, Vietnam vet and former police officer Helms (My Men Are My Heroes: The Brad Kasal Story, 2012) explores the horrendous killing of eight suspected insurgents and 15 innocent civilians (including women and children) in their houses in Haditha, described by some officials as unavoidable “collateral damage” in a day in the life of Marines trying to do their job. The killings took place just after the fatal ambush of one of the Marines’ team when the soldiers swept what they believed were “hostile” houses of al-Qaida insurgents, using grenades and M16s. The then-24-year-old commander in charge of the mission, Sgt. Frank Wuterich, would eventually be court-marshaled and, the author believes, scapegoated for the incident involving seven other defendants. Helms has examined all facets of this tragedy and does not attempt to deny the “cold-blooded” killing of civilians, the evidence for which was carefully examined by the “convening command” and the press, most notably by a TIME cover story in 2006 by Tim McGirk. However, the author asserts that the Marines were trained meticulously for this mission and were essentially doing their work by the book, according to Operation Iraqi Freedom—rather than avenging the death of one of their own, as had been suggested. Moreover, commanding officers initially congratulated the Marines, the “deadliest hunters in the world,” for the success of the mission. Later, however, when the press got wind of it, the Pentagon and Defense Chief Donald Rumsfeld apparently decided to “publicly crucify the Marines.” Helms’ use of sarcasm is off-putting, and the role of his co-author, Faraj, as a lawyer defending Wuterich, leaves no doubt on which side they come down in this unsettling work.
An account of an event that deserves better investigation.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62872-685-5
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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