A group of essays on the Indochina War by the MIT linguist and opponent of American Southeast Asia policy, followed by discussions of academia, language, anarchism, and the work of B. F. Skinner and hereditarian Richard Herrnstein — most of which have previously appeared in such publications as Journal of Contemporary Asia, the Yale Law Journal, Ramparts, Social Policy. and the New York Review of Books. With respect to Vietnam, one of Chomsky's general arguments is that the domino theory has some truth — an independent nationalist model of social and economic development and its contagious appeal would threaten U.S. policymakers' plans for continued control of "the free world." Examining the Pentagon Papers, Chomsky observes that "In its official propaganda, the United States government, like most others, presents itself as a status quo power attempting to uphold a stable international order in the face of violence and aggression. . . the Pentagon historians generally operate within this ideological framework. The documentary record that they were examining, however, reveals that exactly the opposite was the case. At every point, the United States resorted to force to disrupt. . . arrangements that it regarded as detrimental to its global policies. A response by indigenous forces was then labeled 'aggression'. . . ." The Papers' silence about the bombing of the South, and the assertion that "pacification" was viewed chiefly as a military-police problem, are also explored. Chomsky's anti-Skinner article represents one of the most serious polemics to date on behaviorism. The other pieces are relatively slight, summoning "difficult and serious work" as the basis for university reform while themselves avoiding full rigor in their praise of the Berrigans and anarchism. But as a whole, the book is an exercise of great critical gifts on supremely important subjects.
Pub Date: June 29, 1973
ISBN: 1565847946
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1973
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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