An engaging overview bolstered by intriguing appendices, including the August 2009 “McChrystal Report on Afghanistan.”
A brief history of special-forces units, examining how they have altered the ways in which governments approach difficult military problems.
Special-forces units are small, highly skilled groups of soldiers trained for secret operations outside the parameters of traditional military forces. Some of these have connections to organizations such as the Central Intelligence Agency, the United Kingdom’s Special Air Service or Israel’s Mossad. Ex-soldier and Guardian contributor Geraghty (Soldiers of Fortune: A History of the Mercenary in Modern Warfare, 2009, etc.) looks at their post–World War II origins. During the Cold War, special-forces units allowed governments to carry out espionage-related military missions without full-scale war. Similar elite forces developed as an effective way to take on guerrilla warriors and terrorists, particularly in Ireland, Vietnam and Israel. The author entertainingly narrates the tales of various forces and their missions, but he never shies away from the morally gray areas that such units often inhabit. “Much of the history of Special Forces—anyone’s Special Forces,” he writes, “is a story of dirty, morally reprehensible—if effective—work.” Sometimes special-forces operations have failed spectacularly, as when an aborted 1980 attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran led to the deaths of several American soldiers. But there have also been impressive successes, including the famous rescue of terrorist-held hostages by Israeli soldiers at Entebbe Airport in Uganda in 1976. Geraghty effectively shows how the precision allowed by special forces is now being used as part of the U.S. military’s strategy in Afghanistan. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, chosen by President Obama to lead the forces in Afghanistan, is a special forces veteran, and the president, in a landmark speech on Afghanistan military strategy, said that the military will have to be “nimble and precise” to be effective. “For ‘nimble and precise’ read ‘Special Operations Forces’ ” Geraghty writes.
An engaging overview bolstered by intriguing appendices, including the August 2009 “McChrystal Report on Afghanistan.”Pub Date: July 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60598-097-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Borderland/Ivan Dee
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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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