Bestselling novelist and nonfiction military author Clancy (A Guided Tour of an Aircraft Carrier, 1999, etc.) partners with Horner, a Vietnam fighter pilot who rose to general and commander of the Desert Storm air offensive, to narrate the Gulf War from the top commanders” vantage point. The duo portray an air-warrior culture shaped by the perennial possibility of death, whether in the exacting training or in combat. Horner describes the strange rules of engagement dictated to the military in Vietnam from LBJ’s far-off Washington, where politicians often bypassed the advice of military leaders in a policy of “Graduated Pressure” that prolonged the war and caused casualties to mount. Clancy credits young Vietnam-era officers like Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf, and Horner with correcting the mistakes of that war by reforming the Army and Air Force while building the greatest, most effective armed forces in history. The result was a quick victory with few casualties over Iraq’s huge army. Readers get a detailed description of the air offensive and the victory in Kuwait and Iraq of a successful coalition of Arab, European, and American ground troops. There are snapshots of Schwarzkopf (the short fused, perfectionist Commander-in-Chief, who could not bear the agony of losing any of his beloved ground troops), Powell, President Bush, Secretary Cheney, and the Arab high commanders. Horner discusses the philosophy of command and finds that the war was necessary to stop the stealing of vital oil supplies and the murder, rape, and torture inflicted by Iraqi troops on the people of Kuwait. Despite the bravery of soldiers in a just cause, war is still a hateful course of action and should be used as a policy of last resort, Horner declares. An absorbing, detailed, and useful study of soldiers under stress and deadly events that tested their courage, determination and efficiency.
Pub Date: May 10, 1999
ISBN: 0-399-14493-5
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
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
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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