Carr not only examines the campaigns and career of Sherman; he also attacks the mindsets and assumptions that have continued...
William Tecumseh Sherman’s brutal March to the Sea was not the first military rampage against civilians—even in the United States—but it continues to attract attention and comments from military leaders.
Veteran journalist Carr (Fortress Europe: Dispatches from a Gated Continent, 2012, etc.) begins with Sherman’s biography, emphasizing his 1864-1865 southern campaign and equally harsh tactics during the Indian wars that followed. Although the book’s second half ostensibly discusses his legacy in America’s subsequent wars, it turns out to be a grim account of military hypocrisy in the service of mass slaughter. Sherman considered civilians essential to enemy war-making capacity. His troops mostly destroyed property, but this was not the case during the Philippine insurrection (1899-1902), during which soldiers murdered civilians en masse. Similar atrocities in Vietnam were dwarfed by the immense toll from indiscriminate bombing during World War II and the Korean War. Carr reminds readers that Sherman’s campaign produced minuscule deaths compared to the vicious Grant-Lee battles in Virginia. As America has grown intolerant of military casualties, leaders have eagerly adopted high-tech weapons (smart bombs, drones) whose operators work far from the enemy. These weapons turn out to kill a surprising number of bystanders, rendering America’s admirable, winning-hearts-and-minds anti-insurgency paradigm obsolete a mere decade after it was adopted. Sherman might have disapproved of the current tactics. When outraged contemporaries denounced Sherman’s march as a barbarous throwback, this “reflected a widespread assumption that warfare between ‘civilized nations’ had undergone a process of moral advancement in the nineteenth century.” In fact, the “principle of civilian immunity was firmly embedded in the West Point tradition to which Sherman belonged.”
Carr not only examines the campaigns and career of Sherman; he also attacks the mindsets and assumptions that have continued to allow America to rationalize its wars.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59558-955-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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