Among the best Vietnam War histories, and just as painful as the others.
Military history of the Indochinese conflict, prioritizing politics and strategy over battlefield fireworks.
American anticommunists had long obsessed about Vietnam, writes Wawro, director of the Military History Center at the University of North Texas and author of Quicksand: America’s Pursuit of Power in the Middle East. A communist-backed insurgency there had expelled French colonialists and threatened Vietnam’s southern half, which remained “free” after a 1954 treaty gave communists control of the north. President Eisenhower sent aid, President Kennedy added thousands of military advisers, and President Johnson sent fighting troops in 1965. It was no secret that South Vietnam’s ramshackle, corrupt, quasi-military government couldn’t get its act together. Unable to fix matters, America simply took over the war—a terrible policy, as Wawro emphasizes throughout. All too aware of China’s disastrous entry into the Korean War, Johnson refused to allow an invasion of North Vietnam and strictly limited bombing. Conservatives fumed (and still fume). In the South, Americans’ aggressive but ineffective “search and destroy” strategy inflicted severe casualties on Vietcong and North Vietnamese forces but even more on Vietnamese civilians, who made up 40% of the dead. In October 1968, with no victory in sight, opposition to the war increasing, and Richard Nixon (promising a secret peace plan) leading polls for the upcoming election, Johnson abruptly agreed to a withdrawal that conceded most of what Hanoi wanted. Wawro maintains that the war could have ended then if Nixon, in what was likely a treasonous act, hadn’t secretly persuaded South Vietnam’s president to refuse to cooperate. As a result, America “would fight on for four more years, condemn 28,000 more American soldiers to death, and end up getting the same deal that Johnson was about to get.” Wawro’s contempt for generations of misguided policies leaps off the page in this worthy rival to Max Hastings’ brilliant Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy.
Among the best Vietnam War histories, and just as painful as the others.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781541606081
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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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