Black’s academic style can drag readers down in certain dry and wordy sections. However, his scholarly outlook on history...
A dense study of counterfactualism and its use in the practice of history.
The method of examining past events with the knowledge of the circumstances that affected decisions is a powerful tool to understanding what happened. Seeing the uncertainty, the “unknown knowns,” and outside forces that affected historical incidents help us divine why things happened as they did—as well as what might have been. Black (History/Univ. of Exeter; The Power of Knowledge: How Information and Technology Made the Modern World, 2014, etc.) asserts that counterfactualism is more pronounced in Anglophone nations than in those cultures without the freedom to question definitive histories. Even so, he explores and explains its use and the approach to history in cultures as varied as the Mongols, Chinese, Muslims, Ottoman Turks, Finns, and Danes. Readers will need a background in world history, as the author cites battles and wars over the last two millennia. There is a long and interesting chapter on the rise of the West and how Europe took precedence in world affairs. Black explains that assertive, definitive history quells debate, and its need to explain all serves only to mislead. It is better to know the role of the individuals involved, the timing of significant events, and the short- and long-term effects of a counterfactual. Certain disciplines do not respond well to counterfactuals—e.g., social history since it affects too broad a cast. It is more appropriate and useful for military and political history and a boon for teaching. The author’s illustrative examples of “what if,” “how,” and “why” will make readers sit back and wonder—the whole point of counterfactuals.
Black’s academic style can drag readers down in certain dry and wordy sections. However, his scholarly outlook on history today, its ambiguity and uncertainty, the need of analyzing, interpreting, and reinterpreting events, makes it well worth fighting through slow patches to appreciate his extensive store of knowledge.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-253-01704-8
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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