Between the year 1946 and the year 1955, I did not file any income tax returns", so begins the True Confession of the Dean of American Critics, Edmund Wilson, in a book bound to cause comment and serious concern. In short off-the-cuff "essays", the delinquent Mr. Wilson pays his unremitting disrespect to the IRS, a position the subsequent record shows to be only too reasonable indeed, both the personal, professional and, ultimately, "patriotic" sense. Charges Mr. Wilson: "the question of what ought to be taxed and how much and which deduction ought to be allowed" is ensnared in such legislative and linguistic tangles as to resemble a "bureaucratic theology"; among other things it encourages snooping and informing as in the Soviet Union, and develops competing national industries either for tax dodgers or tax collectors. It is a mess, and as a part of Mr. Wilson's experiences demonstrate can be quite as fantastic and as frighteningly funny as a Gogol tale. Only it doesn't stop there, since 70% of all taxation continues the Cold War tradition of more and more nuclear and bacteriological weaponry, more and more governmental control, and a devastating lessening of responsibility or rebuttal on the part of citizens. A stand must be made; henceforth Mr. Wilson shall make "as little money as possible" and so keep below the taxable levels. Now no matter how many holes one could punch in Mr. Wilson's argument and no matter how often he seems to be speaking in a curmudgeonly manner of a Roman Senator lecturing the State, beneath everything a moral earnestness is definitely involved and a social issue of pronounced importance presented. Let us be grateful for so courageous an entry into so controversial an arena.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1963
ISBN: 0374526680
Page Count: 130
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Co
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1963
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
