“A highly creative, illuminating, genre-resisting history.” from red plenty
brooding, difficult father who finally found work at a creamery in Abilene, Kan., and a vivacious, energetic mother whose confidence in her sons’ abilities propelled them to prosper in the world. Smith dutifully points out a few weaknesses in the general’s legend, such as that he lied about his age when applying to West Point, and participated with alacrity in General MacArthur’s shameful clearing of the Bonus Army encampment in Washington, July 1932. Popular, capable, ambitious and a hard worker if not a brilliant mind, Ike was furious that World War I had passed him by, relegated to the peacetime Army—although he leapfrogged the ranks while ingratiating himself wit the major generals of the day. Although he had never led an active command, he was swept into General Marshall’s War Plans Division of the Army after Pearl Harbor. Smith examines Eisenhower’s leadership in the European theater, concluding that he was a master at consensus and delegating, offering the appearance of casual confidence; however, as a field commander his understanding was “abstract and academic.” As president, he capably handled the Suez crisis and sending troops into Little Rock, kept the country out of war and would not abandon his vice president Richard Nixon. He ended his presidency with the still-ringing warning about “the military-industrial complex.” A straight-shooting, comforting account—though not super-enlightening, considering the mountain of previous Ike bios. (86 photographs; 4 maps. Agent: Elizabeth Kaplan)
THE BLACK BANNERS The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al-qaeda
Soufan, Ali H. with Freedman, Daniel Norton (600 pp.) $26.95 | Sep. 12, 2011 978-0-393-07942-5
Could 9/11 have been prevented? By former FBI special agent Soufan’s account, the answer is a resounding yes. In this heavily redacted memoir—some pages contain nothing but crossed-out lines—the author recounts a long career on the trail of al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups, a quest that sometimes seems to have begun before those groups were even up and running. There is not a whisper of self-promotion in his narrative, but it is clear that Soufan was on the case early and often. He writes, for instance, that on reading of a fatwa signed by Osama bin Laden and Muslim clerics in 1998, he wrote a memo to headquarters recommending that the FBI “focus on the threat he posed to the United States. Al-Qaeda came into focus even earlier on: “Al-Qaeda trainers were on the ground during the Battle of Mogadishu (also known as Black Hawk Down)”—a defeat of American forces that bin Laden declared not only a great victory but also proof that the American enemy was weak and lacked the stomach to fight back. Not so, insists Soufan, though given the ineptitude he portrays within FBI and other intelligence agencies, it seems amazing that the country managed to survive the last couple of decades; 9/11 was virtually |
foretold, and yet federal agencies did nothing. Fortunately, he writes, the enemy was also incompetent, particularly when it came to training operatives in how to use explosives. Remarked one prisoner of a training program in Afghanistan, “we’re graduating more people to heaven than out of the class.” The author concludes that al-Qaeda is on the decline, but more groups like it are on the rise. Soufan provides a sobering, sometimes maddening view from the front lines.
RED PLENTY
Spufford, Francis Graywolf (448 pp.) $16.00 paperback | Feb. 14, 2012 978-1-55597-604-0 The strange, sad, hilarious story of the Soviet Union’s blind pursuit of a Communist paradise, told through a mix of history and fiction, using both to get to the truth. Spufford (I May Be Some Time, 2003, etc.) traces the latter half of the history of the Soviet Union, starting in the late 1950s, when the Soviets were seeing an imaginary light over the horizon. After 40 years that included struggle, war, starvation and Stalin, the Marxist dream looked as if it might be taking off under Nikita Khrushchev. The Soviet Union’s economic growth more than doubled that of the United States, and if it kept going at the same rate the “planned economy” would “overtake and surpass” capitalist America. Cars, food and houses would be better, and there would be more money and leisure all around, thanks to a top-down, start-to-finish management that “could be directed, as capitalism could not, to the fastest, most lavish fulfillment of human needs.” Through a series of episodes involving economists, scientists, computer programmers, industrialists, artists and politicians—some real, some imagined, some drawn together from composites—Spufford tells the story of the life and death of a national illusion, as utopian dreams moldered into grim dystopian realities. The planned economy was a worker’s nightmare, where production targets increased even as equipment became more and more outdated, and unforeseen, unplanned events—like the sudden loss of a spinning machine at a textile factory—set off a ripple effect of unproductiveness. Pay cuts and scarce commodities led to riots, such as one in Novocherkassk, where the dead bodies were hauled out and the bloody streets were repaved overnight. In his often-whimsical, somewhat Nabokovian notes, Spufford freely points out his own inventions, approximations and hedged bets on what might have happened. A highly creative, illuminating, genre-resisting history.
kirkusreviews.com
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nonfiction
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15 november 2011
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