Rodman swerves from objective scholarship to partisan cheerleading in this chronicle of the struggle between the US and the Soviet Union for control in the Third World. Rodman served on the National Security Council and in the State Department under presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Bush; he is now an editor of the National Review and a fellow in international studies at Johns Hopkins University. He brings a scholar's eye to the years 191768, describing in dispassionate detail the trends in American and Soviet foreign policy that eventually brought the two superpowers to the battlefields of the Cold War. Rodman describes the tendency of each side to overestimate the abilities and desires of the other. He offers fascinating descriptions of the Soviet struggle to reconcile its support for revolutionary movements in the Third World with classic Marxist-Leninist theory, and of America's ``most profound task'': ``to find the way to reconcile its moral convictions and its strategic responsibilities.'' In describing the years from 1968 on, Rodman is no longer the scholar but the player, and the book becomes a passionate argument for the Kissinger- and Reagan-era policies that Rodman helped formulate. In what became known as the Reagan Doctrine, the US pursued dual tracks of diplomacy and force, negotiating with the Soviets with one hand while fomenting anti-Soviet guerrilla wars with the other. This approach, Rodman insists, turned the tide against communism in the Third World and contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. To make his case, the author offers richly detailed case studies of Third World confrontation points—Afghanistan, Cambodia, Angola, Nicaragua—but his biases are obvious. Rodman's arguments are immensely persuasive, but his contempt for critics of the Reagan Doctrine keeps him from adequately addressing the question suggested by the book's title: What is more precious than peace? The answer would have been of interest to the hundreds of thousands who died on the Cold War's proxy battlefields.
Pub Date: Nov. 22, 1994
ISBN: 0-684-19427-9
Page Count: 642
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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
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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