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Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire
Top of the pile
77
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
78/100Critics
75/100Scholars
Author:
Jonathan M. Katz
Publisher:
St. Martin's Press
Date:
January 18, 2022
A journey tracing America's forgotten path to global powerâand how its legacies shape our world todayâtold through the extraordinary life of a complicated Marine, Smedley Butler.
What The Reviewers Say
... the book is far more extraordinary than even the life of Smedley Butler.
... as Katz travels in the footsteps of Butler, from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to Shanghai, China and back, he illuminates how the Corps had been used in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries to make de facto colonies out of the Philippines, Nicaragua, Panama, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas, American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He also does a masterful job detailing our 1914 invasion of Mexico and the 1900 and 1927 occupations of China.
Gangsters of Capitalism uncovers the ex-Marine’s hidden moments of personal reckoning while turning an unsentimental eye on the real evils he committed during his time as a blunt instrument of US domination.
Lively, deeply researched.
