An intriguing exploration of Operation Wappen that gets bogged down by political tangents.
A writer offers the history of a failed CIA/MI6 coup in 1950s Syria.
It was not until about a half-century later that Maddock, a Marine veteran who participated in early Cold War operations, found evidence of his potential involvement in a planned joint CIA/MI6 coup in Syria code-named Operation Wappen. Fearing the encroachment of communism in the Middle East, the United States spent millions of dollars bribing Syrian military officers in anticipation of the forthcoming 1957 coup. After some of these officers told the Syrian government, the U.S. denied involvement, and, in the words of Maddock’s book subtitle, the failed overthrow became “A War That Never Was.” Though Operation Wappen is the author’s titular focus, the first half of the book attempts to place the attempted coup in the context of not just Cold War history, but also world history spanning nearly two centuries. The true origins of the Cold War are traced by the author to the death of Gen. George Patton. An entire chapter is devoted to espionage conspiracy theories, including cyanide spray guns, that question the official government account that Patton died in a car crash. While referencing problematic sources (such as Killing Patton by former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard, and Wikipedia, which is cited throughout the volume), the work provides speculations about the general’s death that fit into the author’s personal Cold War recollections, which accompany his story of the failed Syrian coup. His other dissections of past events have a distinctly conservative ideological bent that may turn off some readers in his attempt to challenge modern “revisionist” historians hampered by “political correctness.” Maddock’s analysis of American history, for example, emphasizes the advantages held by an “advanced civilization” over “primitive” Native Americans while his appraisal of the Middle East bluntly describes “the 1300 Years’ War” between Muslims and the West. His examination of Operation Wappen, including his personal experiences with the Marines, adds a captivating chapter to the history of the Cold War in the Middle East. But it’s a story often muddled by politicized and sometimes irrelevant historical analysis.
An intriguing exploration of Operation Wappen that gets bogged down by political tangents. (afterword, index)Pub Date: July 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64361-780-0
Page Count: 88
Publisher: Westwood Books Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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