Valor vs. red tape with the soul of democracy at stake.
The author of megaselling novels in the techno/gung-ho genre (The Bear and the Dragon, 2000, etc.) that he practically invented adds an untimely entry to his body of nonfiction dissections (Every Man a Tiger, 1999, etc.) of what makes our military so great: everything you wanted to know about Special Forces except for Afghanistan.
Teamed this time with a retired former chief of US Special Operations Command, Clancy delves into the origins and evolution of the Special Forces concept. Presidents Kennedy and Reagan get special credit for a relevant grasp of realpolitik: the need for a new kind of force capable of Cold War dirty tricks, counterinsurgencies, and holding terrorists to account for their crimes anywhere in the world. Some action vignettes from SF roots in WWII and Vietnam rival Clancy fiction, but things get bogged down with military trivia as the author and General Stiner interweave narratives (liberally laced with the kind of DOD jargon that makes a ship a “naval platform” and an airplane an “aviation asset”) on the Achille Lauro (hijacked cruise liner) incident, “taking down” Noriega's Panama, and other actions. The central theme is a somewhat predictable one of guys in the field taking heat, or worse, because Washington never quite gets it. For example, only after Vietnam, when the Pentagon finally allows that the standard US ground soldier is frighteningly inept at forging good relations with “friendlies,” does that become a top SF training priority. Also well documented is the depth and breadth of opposition to any concept of elite units by mainstream military commanders who tend to see Special Ops planners as “princes of darkness” out to rob the “Big Army” of budget and resources. Obviously caught with the book already in the publishing pipeline when the 2001 War on Terrorism was declared, Clancy awkwardly tacks on a final chapter to cover repercussions of September 11 (but not including any military operations in Afghanistan), which adds nothing original either in his analysis of the Al Qaeda brand of terrorism or proposed countermeasures.
Valor vs. red tape with the soul of democracy at stake.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14783-7
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
A delightful time capsule, skillfully unpacked.
With the Great Depression subsiding and Europe headed for war, New York City threw a party. It didn’t go well.
The theme of the 1939 World’s Fair was “The World of Tomorrow.” Plagued by ferocious rain storms, withering heat waves, labor disputes, power outages, lower-than-expected attendance and weak revenues, the fair’s glittering vision of the future nevertheless managed to amaze most of its 45 million attendees, even as they nervously consumed the news from overseas. Recounting the exposition’s wonders and woes, former Cosmopolitan executive editor Mauro spices his story with tales of visiting presidents, kings, queens, politicians, sports heroes and movie stars. He wonderfully elaborates on the fair’s movers and shakers: feisty Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, imperious and scheming Parks Commissioner Robert Moses and businessman Harvey Gibson, whose feckless application of “homey touches” to the proceedings embarrassed the city’s official greeter and fair president, the pretentious and beleaguered Grover Whalen. Demonstrating how real-world events intruded upon the fair’s assertions of sweetness and light, Mauro follows the careers of two policemen killed removing a bomb from the British Pavilion, and he tracks the activities of Albert Einstein, a three-time Fair visitor. Voluntarily in exile from Germany, the physicist abandoned his well-known pacifism, authoring a letter to Franklin Roosevelt warning about Hitler’s atomic-bomb program, a notification that eventually inspired the Manhattan Project. Before the end of the fair’s first season, many of the countries represented on its grounds were at war. Mauro’s story will likely appeal to fans of Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City (2003), but readers should know that the crime element plays less heavily here.
A delightful time capsule, skillfully unpacked.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-345-51214-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
An engaging meditation on the possibility of reconciliation between the Germans and American Jews who are the grandchildren of the Holocaust generation. Krondorfer is a German academic living in the US. Since the late 1980s he has been organizing encounter groups of college-age American Jews with their German counterparts. His book—in part a report on these therapeutic adventures in Germany and the US, but also an imaginative exploration of themes relating to understanding of the Holocaust—is informative and original. In order to break through the encrustations of stale rhetoric that have accumulated around the topic ``Holocaust'' in both cultures, Krondorfer establishes a ``ritual'' setting in which the anxiety, guilt, anger, and other emotions experienced by the grandchildren's generation can emerge and be discussed. Toward this end he has organized summer programs for students, as well as the Jewish- German Dance Theater, which has performed both in America and in Germany. Their performances have been the scene of sometimes productive, often brutally frank discussions of what it means to be an inheritor of German shame or of Jewish victimhood. Apart from occasional incidents of outright anti-Semitism in Germany, the dancers found that some Germans resented bitterly what they see as not simply Jews but Americans opening old wounds, subverting the young, encouraging them to break family taboos by asking questions about the extent of family members' involvement in Nazi crimes. Some Jewish survivors in the US resented seeing young Jews together with young Germans and having ``their'' Holocaust taken from them by the dancers. Such setbacks notwithstanding, Krondorfer found many people of good will in both countries. Krondorfer's book is theoretically sophisticated, but its strength comes from its vivid, thoughtful accounts of his own and his students' lived experience in Germany and the US.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-300-05959-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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