Bracken’s prescriptions on how to deal with an increasingly nuclear world are surely debatable, but to gauge by this...
Defense Department consultant Bracken (Fire in the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age, 1999, etc.) writes that the nuclear genie is truly out of the bottle, and current efforts at nuclear disarmament ignore geopolitical realities.
“The U.S. desire for a nonnuclear world,” writes the author, “gives America’s opponents a reason to manipulate developments in the other direction…and to shift competition to areas where they feel they have greater advantage.” Thus, when the U.S. disengages from Afghanistan and Iraq, there will still be a nuclear China to contend with—and, if trends continue, a nuclear Iran. In the days of the Cold War, Bracken writes, things were easy; the superpowers subscribed to the theory of mutually assured destruction, and no one was going to pull the trigger knowing that would be the end of it all. Now, he argues, the dynamics have taken “an ominous new turn,” and the idea of mutually assured destruction has seen its day. Besides, he notes, the superpowers found that a nuclear arsenal was a “most useful weapon,” and if it was good enough for the U.S. and the Soviet Union, then why not for Pakistan, Iran and North Korea as well? Bracken notes that though Iran and Pakistan present opportunities for worry, nearby India is more heavily armed, if happily a democracy. He urges multilateralism in any future weapons accords—and, he suggests, the old treaties need reworking—adding that it might make a refreshing change to see an arms control initiative that does not originate with the U.S., which “has led to a bland, uninspiring agenda.”
Bracken’s prescriptions on how to deal with an increasingly nuclear world are surely debatable, but to gauge by this well-tempered essay, it’s a debate worth holding.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9430-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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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