Straws in the crosswinds: the essay on the Vietnam conferences in Paris probably has greater interest than the ones on problems of domestic and international "structures" in general. Kissinger is said to be Nixon's brainiest military adviser. Here he employs discredited platitudes like Hanoi's conviction that American dissent will bring victory. Not surprisingly, he also bypasses the issues of past U.S. sabotage of negotiation offers and current U.S. offensives, simply mentioning "a substantial improvement in the American military position" since the bombing halts. What is notable is the opinion that "negotiating a ceasefire may well be tantamount to establishing the preconditions of a political settlement," and that U.S. imposition of a coalition government would be disastrous. Instead, a withdrawal of "external forces" should push Saigon to settle, formally or tacitly, with the NLF—and/or face collapse. The other two essays are abstract in the most unsatisfactory sense, conservative in the literal sense. Kissinger calls for an international "agreed concept of order." The U.S. dilemma: "there can be no stability without equilibrium," but "equilibrium is not a purpose with which we can respond to the travail of our world." (Watch those imperial pronouns!) The reader who can get through the turgor of "modern states," "thoughtful Europeans," "charismatic leadership" will find criticisms of bureaucratic decision-making; strategic recommendations (NATO must avoid "false inconsistencies between allied unity and detente"); and such amazing dicta as "until the emergence of the race problem [when, one wonders?] we were blessed by the absence of conflicts between classes and over ultimate ends." Doubtless a great many readers will make the effort.
Pub Date: May 1, 1969
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1969
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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