by Robert Mann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 15, 2001
A credible and intellectually honest reevaluation.
A comprehensive history of the political causes of the American conflict in Vietnam.
As the extreme divisiveness that marked the Vietnam War slowly fades into America’s cultural consciousness, historians have busied themselves trying to place the conflict in an appropriate historical perspective. Mann, a veteran US senatorial staffer and acclaimed author (The Walls of Jericho, 1996), combines his insider’s understanding of the era’s political climate with a keen talent for narrative history to produce an insightful analysis of the American experience in Indochina. He casts the conflict as a series of false assumptions and miscalculations, and argues that Ho Chi Minh’s struggle against South Vietnam was not a Cold War expansion of communism so much as it was a nationalist struggle against western colonialism. After having presented Vietnam to the public as conflict over the containment of communism, Mann suggests that US presidents faced the unhappy dilemma of either appearing soft on communism or further miring the nation in an unwinnable war—and he demonstrates the heavy political price paid by Mike Mansfield, George McGovern, and others who opposed the fighting on principle. Mann further implies that such political risk led to Johnson’s gradual and ineffective escalation of the hostilities and Nixon’s equally cautious reduction of American commitment to the region. His research attempts to convince readers of how and why key politicians and policymakers led the nation into the foreign and domestic tumult caused by the war. His focus on political history provides a fresh view of the conflict and allows his account to rise above the many ideologically tainted histories of America in Southeast Asia.
A credible and intellectually honest reevaluation.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-465-04369-0
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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