The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters Book Reviews

The result of the book’s many examples of the nuanced, complicated, and constantly shifting nature of security assistance relationships is to explode the principal-agent relationship and dramatize the fundamental messiness of the practice. [...] The year 2021 represents the 100th anniversary of the founding of the CCP, and 2049 represents the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. [...] Grant to capture Vicksburg— the “Gibraltar of the Confederacy.” Smith presents a Grant new to department- and theater-level command and strains to interpret the early phase of the Vicksburg Campaign according to principles outlined in the writings of the nineteenth-century theorist Baron Antoine-Henri Jomini. [...] The sections detail the chronological sequence of hope, disillusion, and failure—from Du Bois’s hope that World War I would bring positive change to the lives of Black Americans to the disillusionment found in the peace process and the treatment of Black soldiers during and following the war to the failure seen in the deeper retrenchment of White supremacy in the 1920s. [...] These three sections also describe Du Bois’s crafting of “The Black Man and the Wounded World” to capture and publish a history of Black men in the war and detail the frustration in finishing the book and the recognition of the challenges to the legacy of Black participation in the war and to the failure to complete the book due to the vast undertaking and the intervening activity, ultimately over.