After The Real War and Real Peace: the real Nixon. Couched as a manual – how to meet the Soviet challenge in the Third World without the soft-hearts interfering – this is actually Nixon’s diatribe against the antiwar movement, academics, the media, and everyone else he thinks lost Vietnam. Vietnam was a morally correct war for the United States, Nixon argues, since we were trying to save a country from communist tyranny. Virtually alone except for the far right, he still claims that Vietnam was not a civil war; that the 1954 Geneva accords set up what everyone present understood to be two countries. The Diem government was a reasonably decent one by Asian standards, he argues; the Kennedy administration, with its penchant for covert action, blundered in initiating the coup that ousted him. (That blunder he attributes to media misrepresentation of Diem as a persecutor of the Buddhists – who were themselves political manipulators with communist leadership.) For his part, Ho Chi Minh was a murderer and charlatan who “flim-flam-med” the “pathetically gullible O.S.S. officers” he met (during and after WWII) into believing that he was a nationalist. Nixon recites a long string of North Vietnamese atrocities and abuses, complaining that My Lai got disproportionate attention. He cites no sources here or elsewhere, however, and regularly turns isolated incidents into generalizations. Of the post-1969 antiwar movement, he writes: “students shot at firemen and policemen, held college administrators hostage at knifepoint, stormed university buildings with shotguns in hand, burned buildings, smashed windows, trashed offices, and bombed classrooms.” At Kent State, “someone started shooting”; the antiwar movement aided the enemy; and Nixon implies that the blood of Cambodia is on the protesters’ hands, not his. Nixon may have timed his self-defense to Reagan’s aggressive foreign policy and the decline of the Vietnam syndrome, expecting a more sympathetic hearing. Instead, he will undoubtedly reignite a lot of fires that burned out long ago.
Pub Date: April 15, 1985
ISBN: 0877956685
Page Count: -
Publisher: Borders Group
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1985
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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