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September 28
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Steve
gave
to:
A Simple Plan (Paperback)
by Scott Smith
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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recommended for: everyone
read in August, 1997
Steve said:
"I heard a story once about a Holocaust survivor who attended the trial at Nuremburg of the Nazi who commanded the camp in which he was a prisoner. When the defendant was brought in, the Jewish man became hysterical and had to be dragged out of the co...more
I heard a story once about a Holocaust survivor who attended the trial at Nuremburg of the Nazi who commanded the camp in which he was a prisoner. When the defendant was brought in, the Jewish man became hysterical and had to be dragged out of the courtroom. People assumed that seeing the Nazi's face again had simply brought back memories too horrific for the man to bear. He later explained that he'd lost his composure because he saw, for the first time, that this Nazi was not some fire-breathing monster, but just a man, like anyone else. Without the SS uniform, his humanity was laid bare. The Nazi could've been him; the Nazi could've been anyone.
This incident illustrates why Scott Smith's novel "A Simple Plan" is unquestionably the scariest book I've ever read. By far more frightening than anything written by Stephen King, Dean Koontz or even Thomas Harris, "A Simple Plan" touches on an uncomfortable but real truth in life: we're all basically bad, posessing an almost infinite capacity for evil. All we need to find out how bad we can be is the right motivation: anger, lust, greed, jealousy, etc.
For Hank, the novel's main protagonist, the motivation is greed, then fear. Hank is a midwestern accountant with a wife and a baby on the way, a real swell fella, anyone would agree. One Winter day, Hank takes a ride with his no-account brother, Jacob, and Jacob's pal, Lou. An accident sends the three trudging off into the woods, where they happen upon a small airplane that has crashed and been covered over with snow. Inside, they find a dead pilot and a gym bag, which happens to contain around $4 million. The men figure the money is from a drug deal or a robbery. Hank, the upstanding citizen of the group, insists on calling the authorities immediately. Jacob and Lou, however, want to hang onto the cash. Eventually, Hank agrees, but on one condition: they sit on the money for six months - if nothing is heard of it by Summer, they'll split the loot and go their separate ways. It seems painfully simple, but Hank doesn't take into account his brother's impulsive stupidity, or Lou's desperate need to have his share RIGHT NOW. The failings of his partners in crime, as well as his own fear of being caught, send Hank into a downward spiral as the situation gets bad, then worse, then really super-deluxe worse. Toward the end, when Hank is driven to extremes by his own wife's carelessness, the money becomes almost irrelevant.
In a real stroke of genius, Smith tells the entire story from Hank's point of view, giving the reader unencumbered access to Hank's tortured psyche. You find yourself almost relating and understanding when Hank tells himself that the theft is justifiable, then when he graduates to blackmail and murder.
A movie version of this story was made in 1998; it's absorbing, suspenseful and at times unforgettable. All the same, it's inferior to the novel, particularly in the second half. The ending in the film, while tragic and horrifying in its own right, doesn't even come close to the ending in the book, which may stay with me for the rest of my life.
I found "A Simple Plan" at the discount table at the mall in 1995. The dust jacket preview seemed vaguely interesting, so I plucked down my $3.99 and took it home, expecting to read it over the Summer. I finished it two days later, at about 3:00 in the morning. It's that engrossing, and thought-provoking. At one point, Hank's wife, who turns out to be more ruthless than anyone else, says to him: "No one would ever think you'd be capable of doing what you've done." That brilliant line is the entire book in a nutshell.
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Steve
gave
to:
The Terrible Hours: The Greatest Submarine Rescue in History (Paperback)
by Peter Maas
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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recommended for: Anyone, particularly naval history buffs
read in March, 2001
Steve said:
"Ever hear of Charles “Swede” Momsen?
Chances are you haven’t, and that’s a crying shame, but Peter Mass’s superb book “The Terrible Hours” might change that. “Hours” is a painstakingly researched chronicle of the first successfu...more
Ever hear of Charles “Swede” Momsen?
Chances are you haven’t, and that’s a crying shame, but Peter Mass’s superb book “The Terrible Hours” might change that. “Hours” is a painstakingly researched chronicle of the first successful submarine rescue in naval history, with Lt. Commander Swede Momsen as its architect and guide.
Momsen, the head of an experimental diving team, was summoned into action on May 23, 1939 after the Squalus, a new submarine on a training exercise, went down in the North Atlantic Ocean. As the inventor a of a special rescue chamber that had yet to be tested in the field, Momsen was the first man the Navy called. Before Momsen, men who went down with subs were considered a lost cause because of the immense complications that would be involved in a rescue. Momsen changed all that with his chamber, which docked with the Squalus and gradually brought the ship’s 33 surviving crew members back to the surface.
Momsen’s story is made all the more absorbing because Maas frequently injects flashbacks in time where Momsen, during his research and development of rescue devices, experiences delay after delay, endless red tape and, most unforgivably, outright hostility from many officers up the chain of command. His persistence finally paid off with the saving of the Squalus’s men and the ship’s salvage.
The salvage operation involved meticulous attention and much risk-taking by Momsen’s all-volunteer diving team, but it happens after the breathtaking rescue effort, and lives are no longer immediately in jeopardy. Consequently, the book tends to drag a bit in the pre-final stretch, but picks up later in Maas’s account of the Squalus’s service in World War II.
I happened upon this book while shopping, and it jumped out at me. The tragedy of the Russian submarine Kursk (as well as Russian president Putin’s appalling lack of response to it) was still fresh in my mind. Thank the good Lord that in 1939, our men at sea had a determined, compassionate man like Swede Momsen looking after them. The term “hero” is routinely thrown around lightly in our age, used to describe rock stars and pro athletes. Most of the real heroes perform inspiring acts of courage and pass on without the world at large knowing their names. Swede Momsen was one of those people, and that’s why “The Terrible Hours” is not only an entertaining book but an important one.
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September 20
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Steve
gave
to:
Man of the Hour (Mass Market Paperback)
by Peter Blauner
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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recommended to Steve by:
No one
recommended for: Anyone
read in August, 2000
Steve said:
"My wife continually tells me what small treasures I can find at yard sales. I always scoff. But of course, she’s always right. A couple of years ago I came across a table full of dog-eared books at a neighborhood yard sale. “Man Of The Hour” ju...more
My wife continually tells me what small treasures I can find at yard sales. I always scoff. But of course, she’s always right. A couple of years ago I came across a table full of dog-eared books at a neighborhood yard sale. “Man Of The Hour” jumped out at me immediately. The author, Peter Blauner, didn’t ring any bells, but the intriguing cover photo was a close-up television image of an explosion with a car in the foreground. I picked it up, read the dust jacket’s synopsis of the story, and plopped down my fifty cents.
I hardly ever seem to find books that are difficult to put down any more, but “Man Of The Hour” hooked me. One reason is the general plot, which concerns David Fitzgerald, a New York high school teacher who saves the life of a student after the terrorist bombing of a school bus. After a few weeks of living large as the local hero (strangers fawn over him, the president mentions him in a speech and his own son asks for his autograph), the tables turn when he’s suddenly fingered as the prime suspect in the bombing. It’s likely that Blauner was influenced by the account of Richard Jewell, the security guard who spotted a suspicious knapsack, which turned out to be a bomb, at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta (You can refresh your memory of that particular case at: http://www.time.com/time/magaz....
As in Jewell’s situation, David’s life is turned upside down when the media announce that the cops have fingered him. It gets even worse when a reporter runs a story unjustly accusing him of domestic abuse. His possessions are carted away by the authorities (“What’s yours is ours,” one FBI agent tells him coldly), his friends avoid him and he may lose custody of his son to his estranged wife. His wife, by the way, is your basic cuckoo bird.
What may save him, beyond his innocence and the determination to clear his name, is Elizabeth, a pretty young Arab student of his whose brother, Nasser, is the real bomber. The boy has fallen in with an extremist group that talks of the glorious Islamic holy war that’s coming to town, and Nasser spends most of the book torn, quite believably, between what he knows is right and what his whacky friends are telling him.
Blauner does a couple of things very well in this book: first, he tells the story from almost every conceivable point of view. You see things from the perspective of David; the cops investigating the case; the reporter who recklessly smears David for the world to see; and, of course, the real villains of the piece. Second, Blauner employs a spare but fluid writing style. Each chapter is only about four pages long, but the prose is smooth, clever and even almost poetic in a few spots. This provides the reader with sufficient tension that builds up to the climax, which is predictable in some ways and surprising in others.
“Man Of The Hour” is a superbly written thriller that any lover of good, tight fiction should seek out. It’s worth the effort.
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January 29
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Steve
gave
to:
Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission (Paperback)
by Hampton Sides
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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Steve said:
"If the events in Hampton Sides� book �Ghosts Soldiers� weren�t backed up by historical documentation and a number of surviving eyewitnesses, some might have a hard time believing it ever happened. It reads like an old John Wayne movie, chock-...more
If the events in Hampton Sides� book �Ghosts Soldiers� weren�t backed up by historical documentation and a number of surviving eyewitnesses, some might have a hard time believing it ever happened. It reads like an old John Wayne movie, chock-full of colorful military leaders, hardened and eager fighters, a few truly evil villains and a daring, frighteningly perilous WWII rescue mission. Part of the reason it almost feels like a movie is Sides, a contributing editor for Outside magazine, who tells the story in a fluid, solidly absorbing style that makes the book a relentless page turner. I finished all 342 pages in four days (possibly a record for me).
The story begins with the horrific slaughter of American POWs by Japanese troops on an airstrip in the Philippines in January 1945. Thanks to one prisoner who managed to escape and bear witness to what happened, the alarm goes out: intelligence tells the U.S. Army�s high command that as the Japanese are drawing back from their territory in the Philippines, they are systematically murdering the British and American prisoners under their watch. Under the command of the charismatic Colonel Henry Mucci, 121 soldiers from the elite 6th Ranger Battalion, along with 280 brave Filipino rebel guerrillas, carefully make their way thirty miles behind enemy lines to Cabanatuan, a ghastly prison camp holding 513 Allied prisoners.
Sides brilliantly inter-cuts the Rangers� efforts with the ordeal of the prisoners, many of whom are survivors of the gruesome 1942 Bataan Death March. These unfortunate men are forced to endure unthinkable hardships such as malaria, dysentery, hunger and thirst, not to mention the appalling brutality of their Japanese captors (one serviceman recalls seeing a Japanese soldier knock a prisoner�s teeth out for his gold fillings; another has his finger chopped off by a guard who wanted his West Point Academy ring). Much of this rough treatment was likely due to the Japanese Army�s adherence to the old Samurai code, which taught that men who surrendered, as the Americans did, were without honor and beneath contempt. The Imperial Japanese Army, in fact, told their own soldiers they were expected to die before surrendering to an enemy. Talk about a culture of death.
While Sides does a good job of describing the sometimes indescribable cruelty of the Japanese guards toward their charges, he�s careful to avoid any 40�s era Jap-baiting, pointing out various, if infrequent, acts of kindness committed by the enemy. He writes of one guard who actually gave a prisoner a chocolate bar and a reassuring pat on the back during the march to Cabanatuan. He dedicates a significant amount of space to General Masaharu Homma, a compassionate, sensitive leader who instructed his subordinates to treat their Allied captives with decency in accordance with the Geneva Convention. His greatest sin, perhaps, was that he was too preoccupied with battle plans to pay much attention to how his men were actually treating the POWs.
The portions of the book that illustrate the suffering of the prisoners are both heartbreaking and inspiring. It�s infuriating beyond comprehension to read of men who died of starvation, thirst and disease while, by all accounts, the Japanese kept plenty of food, water and medicine just on the other side of the camp. It�s stirring to read of the indomitable will of many of the men who simply refused to give in to despair, and of the iron friendships that developed between the POWs. Sides mentions a tale of two pals who had both lost their teeth during captivity: �Somehow or another, one of them acquired a set of dentures. The two men developed a routine during mealtimes: "When the first man finished eating, he removed his dentures, rinsed them, and then handed them over so his friend could eat."�
When the Rangers finally strike at the prison, there�s a sense of exhilaration at the salvation of the �Ghosts Of Bataan�, as well as some payback visited upon their Japanese tormentors. The prisoners are shocked and at first immobile, almost not believing that help has finally arrived after three hellish years. The Rangers, for their part, are horrified at the immensely dire physical condition of their countrymen, and more determined than ever to get their comrades back to friendly territory.
The story of the rescue mission received massive press coverage at the time, but, as the book says, was quickly replaced in the public consciousness by places like Iwo Jima and Hiroshima. Hampton Sides has done the brave POWs, and the Rangers who liberated them, a great service with �Ghost Soldiers�. It�s not merely a fast-paced, absorbing read, but an important piece of history, the account of a band of brothers who refused to let their fellow Americans perish at the hands of the enemy. �Ghost Soldiers� is simply one of the best books about World War II I have ever read, and it gets my highest recommendation.
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Steve
gave
to:
See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (Paperback)
by Robert Baer
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in April, 2002
Steve said:
"“Apply to the CIA.”
Those words, spoken by Robert Baer’s post-college roommate in the mid-1970s, were the beginning of his 20-year odyssey through the bowels of America’s intelligence apparatus. The son of an adventurous, impulsive mother...more
“Apply to the CIA.”
Those words, spoken by Robert Baer’s post-college roommate in the mid-1970s, were the beginning of his 20-year odyssey through the bowels of America’s intelligence apparatus. The son of an adventurous, impulsive mother, Baer traveled the world as a child and attended Georgetown University, ending up without any real clue as to what his career goals were. It’s ironic that Baer really joined the CIA, at least initially, almost as a goof. In time, as he states in his absorbing memoir, “See No Evil”, he came to cherish and love the agency and its mission. He also came to be disturbed and distressed as the agency began to step onto bureaucratic and politically correct landmines throughout the 80s and 90s, seeming not to notice its ever more muddled state.
Baer says that when the CIA first took him on in the late 70s, he expected the agency to revoke his employment at any moment when they discovered his past, which included his rides through the halls of Georgetown University on a motorcycle (wearing only a towel), a leftist mother who liked to discuss Marxist theory with fellow travelers, and some of his more colorful roommates (a couple he once stayed with had anarchist leanings and a pet Boa Constrictor that would occasionally run loose). For some reason, they never did.
Baer recounts his adventures at “The Farm”, the CIA’s training facility in rural Virginia, and his eventual placement in the Middle East. His job was to recruit spies from certain countries and get them to acquire information for him. Essentially, he was supposed to get people to betray their own governments. Some, of course, didn’t need all that much persuasion. Many were eager to do it, either for money or hatred of their leaders.
In the 1980s, Baer sifted through documentation and information gained from informants to find the parties responsible for embassy bombings and kidnappings as well as the devastating attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. The agency, growing increasingly enthralled by, and dependent on, computer and satellite technology, began to neglect its other operational asset - human intelligence. Baer implies, quite correctly, that one cannot succeed without the other.
Things only got worse in the 1990s as the agency became demoralized by politically correct policies, careerism and the witch-hunt conducted against CIA field officers by the FBI after the arrest of the spy Aldrich Ames (while at the same time, the FBI’s own Robert Hanssen was selling state secrets to the Russians in garbage bags). In one instance, in 1994 Baer called CIA headquarters from Tajikistan to request a debriefing officer who was fluent in Pashtun to speak to refugees coming across the border from Afghanistan. HQ gave Baer this interesting little tidbit: CIA no longer saw the need to collect any information on Afghanistan since the end of its war with the Soviets, and instead offered to send a four-person team to brief him about the dangers of sexual harassment on the job.
Baer also recounts how Washington badly fumbled a coup attempt against Saddam Hussein in 1995. According to Baer, the time and opportunity to take Saddam out presented itself more clearly than ever, but it was aborted at the last minute. There’s no guarantee that it would’ve worked, or that we could’ve replaced the dictator with someone more sympathetic to Western democracy, but there was at least a chance that we could’ve gotten rid of Saddam more cleanly and avoided a war that, as of this writing, has cost nearly 4,000 American lives.
One gripe I have about the book is Baer’s stinginess with details of his personal life; around the mid-point he abruptly reveals that he was married for a short time and had three children, then just as quickly dismisses the subject. It’s understandable, in a way, given the secrecy that has been necessary for Baer to conduct his job properly (and I’m sure he’s made his share of enemies, so it has to be partly to protect his family). I just would’ve been interested to see how his loved ones lived with his rather unusual occupation and his tight-lipped attitude towards it. I also would’ve liked to read how his left-leaning mother reacted to her only son’s dedication to an agency she undoubtedly saw as a den of pure malevolence.
There are also parts of the book that are a little hard to follow for a layman, including Baer’s attempt to find the terrorists responsible for the bombing of the American Embassy in Beirut in 1983. Baer’s investigation is a bewildering labyrinth of details that fly by at blinding speed. It’s so confusing I had to read it about three times and still wasn’t quite sure how he’d come to his conclusions. Baer himself, as if sympathetic to the reader, admits to the story’s dizzying complexities.
Baer's moral is that our best protection is vigilance, strength and a dedicated, persistent commitment to the truth at all costs. Baer makes a common-sense appeal for precisely that kind of defense in “See No Evil”, an entertaining and enlightening chronicle of lessons he acquired as a ground soldier in the clandestine war against terrorism - lessons that, for many in our government, have yet to be learned.
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January 23
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Steve
read and liked
Erin's
review of Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001:
"I got this book for free by reviewing a chapter of a writing textbook for some publisher. It sat on my shelf for a year and a half while I scraped together the courage to actually read it. At 500 pages, this is one long piece of nonfiction. The title...more
I got this book for free by reviewing a chapter of a writing textbook for some publisher. It sat on my shelf for a year and a half while I scraped together the courage to actually read it. At 500 pages, this is one long piece of nonfiction. The title alone is exhausting. But it won a Pulitzer! So away we go.
The book begins shortly before I was born, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and erected a Communist leader. I don't remember this guy's name, but he never really had a strong grip on the country. That's all you need to know. (Clearly this is going to be a scholarly review.) From there, things get worse for Afghanistan. And then worse. And then worse. And then, again, worse.
Now when I was in high school, I wasn't very into politics. I was more into staying on top of my nearly-4.0 at all costs. To an amazingly navel-gazing extent. But if you had asked me about Bill Clinton, I probably would have said that the whole Monica Lewinsky thing was right up there on the list of Most Important Things For America to be Worrying About.
The important thing about that being, I was in high school. And whoever was making all that brouhaha probably should have been a little smarter than I was, because according to this book, there were about a million other things that were more important. One of which was Osama Bin Laden ratcheting up the crazy in a very public way.
Steve Coll does a great job of presenting the facts without being partisan. However, as we all know (and by we I mean the postmodern feminist deconstructionists out there, so basically everyone reading this blog), all writing is political. Certain people, they don't look so good at the end of the book. When Bill Clinton says, "Well you know I really tried. That Osama sure is slippery though," (or something to that effect) you can't help saying, really Bill? Because maybe if you hadn't been such an asshole things would have worked out differently.
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Steve
read and liked
Mark's
review of The Forever War:
"Let's say you're shipping off to a particular battle in a war. By the time you reach the battle, fight it, and return home, everyone you know has died of old age and the society you protected has evolved (or devolved) into something you don't recogn...more
Let's say you're shipping off to a particular battle in a war. By the time you reach the battle, fight it, and return home, everyone you know has died of old age and the society you protected has evolved (or devolved) into something you don't recognize or particularly like. What would you be fighting for?
That's just one of the issues brought up in "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman.
The Plot
In this novel of galactic war, the alien menace is the Taurans. The war is fought over collapsars, which are wormhole entrances through which you can travel great distances without traversing the intervening space. The only thing is, you have to travel from a base of operations to a collapsar at light speed, causing the "time dilation" effect described by Einstein. That is, time passes on earth relatively quickly compared to time passing on the ship. Therefore, a trip to a collapsar taking a few months for the people on board takes decades relative to the people on earth.
The novel's protagonist is a man named Mandella, who is drafted into the war at its onset. He travels to and from battles, finding that Earth and its society changes drastically upon each return.
The Good
The battle sequences are abundant and the action is well portrayed. The familiar military science fiction standby of armored fighting suits is recycled here. However, it's well done and necessary to the plot, as the environments in which the battles occur are hostile to human life.
The non-battle sequences are the most compelling part of the book, though. The way Mandella views and experiences the changing of human society and social evolution when he returns home from a battle is what makes the book so special. Mandella, a twentieth century man, has to adapt to drastic changes, and ends up doing so, which makes the tone of the novel hopeful, in my opinion.
The novel also incorporates a lot of hard science. The relativistic time dilation effect is just one example. At one point in the story, a stasis field is invented, rendering futuristic weapons obsolete and forcing the soldiers to go back to melee weapons like swords and battle axes. Also, did you ever wonder what a small conventional missile traveling at near the speed of light would do to a planet?
The book also addresses the nature of war to a certain extent. Haldeman states in the introduction of the novel that it was written to be about Vietnam. There's certainly evidence of it here as Humanity's war with the Taurans is probably ten times as screwed up as Vietnam was.
The Bad
I bet many of you didn't know that the interstellar war with the Taurans began in 1997. Maybe you just forgot. That's the main problem I had with the book. Haldeman addresses this in his introduction and tells the reader to think of it as a parallel universe. I didn't really buy this, but I do know that, for the purposes of the story, Mandella had to be a twentieth-century-born man, so that his reactions to the changing of society could be genuine. However, this obvious anachronism just bothered me a little bit.
I didn't really buy some of the societal changes, either. At one point, homosexuality becomes the norm and hetero becomes the exception. I don't see this happening unless genetic engineering comes into play, which it eventually does.
Also, some of the aspects of future military life are infeasible to me. There are co-ed platoons of soldiers who openly sleep with each other in a kind of "hippie free love" way, which I just didn't buy. Also, there's open smoking of marijuana which would never be allowed in any military of any era, I believe.
Conclusion
None of the bad points I mention detract significantly enough from the novel for me not to recommend it highly. It's a good read. It's also considered to be a classic of Science Fiction Literature. Read It! ...less
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January 21
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Steve
gave
to:
Last Ship (Paperback)
by William Brinkley
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in October, 2007, has a copy to sell/swap
Steve said:
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
The story, told entirely from the captain's point of view, begins with the launching of his own missles at Russia (the book was written before the Soviet Union's demise in 1991), the crew's ghastly tour through a radiation-ravaged Europe and Africa, then culminates with their discovery of a seemingly idyllic, and uncontaminated, south Pacific island.
Brinkley imbues each moment with raw, shocking power. After the war itself comes their meeting with a Soviet submarine; their first contact with people off the Mediterranean Sea, in the final stages of radiation sickness; a mutiny by the ship's first officer; and a finale on the island whose boldness I could not help but admire. Thanks in part to Brinkley's Navy background, the book also has a terrific feel of authenticity that Tom Clancy fans are sure to gobble up.
The novel, however, sports a number of weaknesses, chief among them being Brinkley's habit of using three pages to describe a feeling or thought the captain may be having when half a page or less would have been more than sufficient. This accounts for the book's unusual length (almost 600 pages), and can tax the patience of even the most tolerant reader. At many points, I found myself skimming through the more verbose passages, thinking, cut to the chase!
There is a subplot, late in the story, about a serial killer among the crew that seems contived and is thrown aside as abrubtly and clumsily as it was introduced. The author also injects a realistic, three-pronged dilemma on the island concerning sex, the limited number of women in the crew, and the question of how to keep the human race from becoming extinct. The solution the captain comes up with is something I'm not sure would be entirely workable (not to say that I'd come up with anything better). In the midst of this, the captain also falls for the ship's senior female officer. Their affair is described in a way that seems more pornographic than erotic. This is supposed to be a serious novel, not "Letters To Penthouse".
Overall, "The Last Ship" is a worthwhile reading experience, if you can get past the author's tendency to indulge in rambling with his prose. Brinkley is clearly a good writer - maybe even a great one - but, at least with this book, he really could've used a stricter editor.
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January 19
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Steve
gave
to:
Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (Paperback)
by Steve Coll
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in October, 2008
Steve said:
"This book provides an extraordinarily detailed picture of the colossal bureaucratic and intelligence blunders that enabled radical Islamists over two decades which would culminate in the catastrophe of September 11th, 2001.
The author interviews...more
This book provides an extraordinarily detailed picture of the colossal bureaucratic and intelligence blunders that enabled radical Islamists over two decades which would culminate in the catastrophe of September 11th, 2001.
The author interviews most of the major players and documents the short-sightedness of not only the CIA and State Department, but also the presidents: Reagan, who only saw the Soviet threat of the 1980s in Afghanistan; Bush Sr., who seemed clueless about the civil war that engulfed the country after the Russian withdrawal ("Is that thing still going on?"); Clinton, who worried incessantly about opinion polls and concentrated only on capturing bin Laden without moving against Al Qaeda (sort of like capturing Jefferson Davis while ignoring the Confederacy as a whole); and Bush Jr., who spent most of 2001 stressing his education prposals and not military readiness, at least until the planes hit.
"Ghost Wars" is a fascinating, illuminating and objective view of our holiday from history that helped only to provoke a soul-blackening act of mass murder.
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Steve
gave
to:
Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case (Hardcover)
by Stuart Taylor
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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