by Brink Lindsey ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2007
A thoughtful attempt to explain—and claim—the broad center in the middle of our political squabbling.
Americans have become libertarian and don’t even know it, declares the research head of the (libertarian) Cato Institute.
In his provocative analysis, Lindsey (Against the Dead Hand, 2001) argues that mass affluence has profoundly changed the nation, fostering the well-known red/blue split in our politics. Little noticed, however, is the emergence of a “purplish centrism” that reflects fiscally conservative, socially liberal libertarian thinking. This fusion now dominates our cultural and political values, contends the author, who provides considerable evidence for his thesis in this readable account of American life since World War II. With the shift in the 1950s from scarcity-based self-restraint to abundance-based self-expression, Americans began creating a pluralistic, middle-class consumer society that fostered tremendous changes: the transformation of family life, the rise of a youth culture, the sexual revolution. Ultimately, opposing counterculture and evangelical movements emerged, leading to the present left/right division. Lindsey offers sharp snapshots of key people during these years of turmoil, from psychologist Abraham Maslow, whose hierarchy of needs pointed the way to the pursuit of personal fulfillment, to LSD-inspired spiritual-seeker Steve Jobs, who co-founded Apple and helped shape Silicon Valley. The author also nicely renders moments suggesting the coming divide. In April 1967, for example, Haight-Ashbury hippies planned the famous Summer of Love in San Francisco while revivalist and faith-healer Oral Roberts held dedication ceremonies for his eponymous university in Oklahoma. After the excesses of the ’60s and ’70s, Americans began repairing social bonds during Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” era, finding ways to balance greater freedom and choice with self-restraint. The accidental result we see today is a compromise between left and right that Lindsey dubs “a kind of implicit libertarian synthesis.”
A thoughtful attempt to explain—and claim—the broad center in the middle of our political squabbling.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-074766-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Collins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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