More literate and convincing than most of its kind: a good candidate for business-minded readers seeking something for...
Pop business meets military and intellectual history in this intriguing study of strategizing as a habit of being.
Look for red hats in a crowd, writes former Ford Foundation executive and Columbia Business School visiting professor Duggan, and you’ll almost certainly find them. That “confirmation bias” poses a danger for anyone reading the historical record to look for patterns—but, he gamely remarks, it also shows, at the very least, “that red hats exist.” The red hat here is Duggan’s overarching notion of Napoleon’s famed coup d’oeil—the telling glance, or, as the German strategist von Clausewitz defined it, “the rapid discovery of a truth which to the ordinary mind is not visible at all or only becomes so after long examination and reflection.” For Napoleon, the key to success was to study in close detail and replay battles of the past, looking for the critical moment at which the certainty of victory became apparent and seeking to re-create that moment in the present; his theorizing yielded the doctrine, studied by military officers ever since, that the successful leader will, in the words of former NATO commander Wesley Clark, “bring the enemy to battle at the time and place of your choosing, where you had the advantage and could finish him.” By Duggan’s account, not only generals benefit from that coup d’oeil: Pablo Picasso had the knack, and it enabled him to maneuver his talents onto ground carefully prepared by the likes of Henri Matisse, just as Martin Luther King Jr. was able to read the scent of change on the wind and, with the aid of many an unsung lieutenant, move the civil-rights struggle to more favorable ground. Duggan sometimes stretches the facts a bit to suit his thesis, but with no harm done, and he turns up plenty of fruitful case studies—including a few pleasant surprises, such as his inventive reading of a medieval African epic and his revisionist take on the publican Saul’s self-reinvention as the disciple Paul on the road to Damascus.
More literate and convincing than most of its kind: a good candidate for business-minded readers seeking something for airplane or nightstand.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56025-457-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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 Yorkerstaff 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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