A can’t-miss for anyone interested in current military affairs.
A penetrating look inside the military units operating armed drones on remote battlefields around the world.
Phelps, a former Marine who served five deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq, works from—and expands on—the principles laid out in Dave Grossman’s On Killing (1995), which investigated the intense psychological forces affecting troops involved in lethal action. The author draws heavily on interviews with members of the armed forces who operate remotely piloted aircraft, as drones are officially known. The military has always sought to increase the distance from which it attacks enemy forces, if only as a way to protect its own soldiers. From spears and arrows to artillery, aircraft, and long-range missiles, the distance has grown steadily over time. From that perspective, RPAs are a natural progression. Phelps, who has commanded multiple Unmanned Aircraft System teams, takes pains to contest the flawed perception that using RPAs is equivalent to playing computer games. The warriors who fire their weapons have often spent weeks or months observing their targets, waiting for a time when there is no risk of killing bystanders. They may know more about their targets than their own next-door neighbors, and they see with unusual clarity what happens after they “pull the trigger.” Inevitably, there is an often devastating emotional effect. Add to that the conditions under which they work, often serving long shifts that lead to dangerous sleep deprivation. Nor does their culture encourage them to seek help for the crushing mental stress. Furthermore, even as the number of RPA operators has dramatically increased, they are still treated as less important than “real” pilots or soldiers who are directly exposed to enemy fire. Phelps provides ample quotations from RPA operators as well as detailed reports of their necessary work. Drone warfare is seemingly ubiquitous, and the author delivers a clear report on how it works and how it affects the users.
A can’t-miss for anyone interested in current military affairs.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-316-62829-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
A vigorous and highly readable plan for building the finances of a new business.
A program of cash-management techniques for aspiring entrepreneurs, aimed at a minority readership.
At the beginning of this business book, Mariga reflects on the birth of her daughter, Florence, and on the depressing prospect of returning to her corporate job and missing some of her baby’s early moments. She realized that she “wanted to show Florence…that I could, that she could, that anyone could be anything they wanted to be in this world.” To that end, she wanted to start her own business, and she “wanted to help entrepreneurs build successful businesses that provide opportunities for others.” In a sentiment reflected by others she’s interviewed, she says that she wanted to strengthen her family legacy, so she founded her own accounting firm. She paints a vivid picture of the hardscrabble early days of other minority business owners like herself, the child of an African American mother and a Chinese father who also had a family accounting business. She and others were “all hustling to acquire clients and build our businesses…and most of us had absolutely nothing to show for it.” She was inspired by Mike Michalowicz’s Profit First money management system, and the bulk of her book is devoted to an explanation of how to make this system work for minority business enterprises. (Michalowicz provides a foreword to the book.) One of the primary goals of Profit First is to build “a self-sustaining, debt-free company,” so a large part of Mariga’s work deals with the details of managing finances, building and abiding by budgets, and handling the swings of emotion that occur every step of the way. As sharply focused as these insights are, the author’s recollections of her own experiences are more rewarding, as when she tells readers of her brief time as a cut-rate accountant and learning that it was a mistake to try to compete on price. These stories, as well as financing specifics and clear encouragements (“Small changes and adjustments accumulate. Over time, they will lead you to your goal”), will make this book invaluable to entrepreneurs of all kinds.
A vigorous and highly readable plan for building the finances of a new business.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-7357759-0-6
Page Count: 230
Publisher: The Avant-Garde Project, LLC
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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