In a well-articulated, arresting argument, Lebow (Political Science/Pittsburgh) and Stein (Political Science/Toronto) assert that the conventional wisdom that the West won the cold war is mistaken, and that military spending and geopolitical rivalry have exhausted the US and the countries of the former USSR, with implications that continue to haunt us today. Lebow and Stein make their case by examining two crises of the cold war: the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and 1973 the Arab-Israeli War. In both cases, the authors persuasively argue, the crisis was caused by politicians playing the game of ``deterrence.'' In Cuba, the American threat to use nuclear weapons was an escalation of the crisis; once the superpowers confronted each other, they needed to compromise in order to resolve the impasse (the problem was resolved when both governments agreed to remove missiles). In 1973, the US tried to prevent the Soviet Union from intervening in the Arab-Israeli War by alerting its strategic and conventional forces worldwide. Here, the crisis was resolved when the Soviet Union declined to respond to the alert. The authors argue, based on newly available evidence, that far from deterring the Soviet Union, the US worldwide alert actually might have escalated the crisis; the Soviet Union never had any intention of actually intervening, and a large group in the Kremlin argued that the it should respond by alerting its own forces. After examining how compromise and moderation resolved crises caused by deterrence theorists, Lebow and Stein contend that the nuclear arms race, far from preventing WW III, actually exacerbated superpower tensions and review evidence that Reagan's expansion of defense spending after 1981 delayed rather than accelerated the process of reform in the Soviet Union, which occurred for reasons largely unrelated to the superpower rivalry, and wasted resources urgently needed for domestic purposes. The authors conclude that deterrence prolonged rather than ended the cold war. An intelligent and provocative examination of the legacy of the cold war.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-691-03308-0
Page Count: 552
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993
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 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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