PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksThe first major work to consider the War on Terror in its entirety, Reign of Terror documents the last 20 years of state-sponsored violence at a blistering pace, creating a near-constant cycle of recollection and frustration for the reader. Ackerman’s real achievement is a commitment to scale, an expansiveness that encourages readers to see the long view. The results are terrifying ... Ackerman has sketched a chilling first draft of this part of American history, and he has done so with an implicit challenge: how do we make it right?
Matt Farwell and Michael Ames
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksBergdahl’s odyssey, in Farwell and Ames’s account, is far more complex than his solitary journey may suggest. The young soldier’s ordeal, the authors contend, offers a glimpse into the dysfunctional and unending prosecution of the United States’s longest war ... While Farwell and Ames take care to credit some of the painstaking work—of diplomats, intelligence officers, and military service-members—American Cipher paints a dark picture of American military and intelligence services as interested in controlling their own image, regardless of truth, as they are in finding Bergdahl or ending the war ... While Farwell and Ames offer a humane depiction of a young American enmeshed in a net of contradictory American values and practices, they have little sympathy for the architects of American policy in Afghanistan ... The war perpetuates itself out of bureaucratic inertia, a reality American Cipher exposes unreservedly.
Sam Kleiner
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksSam Kleiner’s The Flying Tigers, a brisk history of the American Volunteer Group’s exploits in China, challenges wistful backward glances to the seemingly straightforward American intervention in World War II. The Flying Tigers’s heavy reliance on memoirs, letters, battlefield reports, and newspaper stories transports the reader into the early days of the War, but Kleiner ensures that we never look back uncritically ... The Flying Tigers reads like an adventure story, as Kleiner deftly takes his reader from cramped cockpits to quiet Washington corridors. But it’s also a cautionary tale. The resulting narrative impresses us with just how terrifyingly easy the projection of military power can be ... As a historical account, The Flying Tigers feels a little incomplete. For all the detail about the Tigers’ exploits, we never see much from the Japanese perspective, and the concentration can feel isolating. The Flying Tigers may not offer the reader a completely balanced battlefield perspective, but the omission has the effect of aligning us with Kleiner’s subjects.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
