Just when you thought the world might become a kinder, gentler, even safer place, a veteran military analyst appears with an arresting reminder that, notwithstanding the cold war's end, our planet still encompasses a full measure of potential hot spots. With assistance from his colleagues at HERO-TNDA (a Washington-area think tank), Dupuy (Elusive Victory, 1978, etc.) singles out ten regions where conventional conflicts, with sobering implications for the rest of the world, may occur before the turn of the century. Among other likely combat zones, he identifies the Asian subcontinent (India vs. Pakistan for a fourth time), the Balkans, Korea, the Sino-Russian border, and southern Africa. By Dupuy's reckoning, the Middle East could prove the bloodiest venue, as he looks there for a sixth Arab/Israeli clash and a third Gulf War (pitting Iran against Iraq), plus strife among Egypt, Libya, and Sudan. The author presents his all-too-plausible scenarios as history, written retrospectively. Thus, he offers background information that is accurate through late 1991, at which point his account turns conjectural. While hypothetical, Dupuy's detailed briefings (each of which includes an assessment of the casus belli, orders of battle, a review of major engagements, casualty figures, and a predicted outcome) are impressively credible. In evaluating possible hostilities, for example, Dupuy (a retired Army colonel) employs a statistical model he developed to gauge the lethality of modern weapons systems. Absorbing, informed speculation of interest to armchair generals and others. The text has helpful tabular material throughout.
Pub Date: Jan. 20, 1993
ISBN: 0-446-51670-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
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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