Though remarkably comprehensive for its limited length, more of Kennedy's voice would have served Sandler’s purpose better.
A selection of letters to and from John F. Kennedy written over the course of 35 years.
Sandler (Imprisoned: The Betrayal of Japanese Americans During World War II, 2013, etc.) asserts that "one can discover more about Kennedy the man, Kennedy the president, and the extraordinary and harrowing times in which he lived by reading his correspondence than through any number of the scores of books that have been written about him." This volume, however, presents only about 75 letters by Kennedy, many quite short. Sandler fills out the remainder of the book with letters and telegrams to Kennedy from correspondents ranging from Queen Elizabeth and Billy Graham to ordinary American voters and schoolchildren. Most of the letters appear in three sections, introduced in adulatory prose, covering the presidential election of 1960, domestic policies of the administration and foreign crises. These include a tactful exchange with Eleanor Roosevelt, firmly rebutting her assertion that Joseph Kennedy was attempting to buy the presidency for his son; frequent well-deserved hectoring missives from Martin Luther King Jr. and other black leaders urging Kennedy to do more to support their efforts; and secret letters to and from Nikita Khrushchev about the Berlin and Cuban missile crises, when Kennedy was struggling to overcome the Russian's perception that he was a lightweight. A memo to the commander of NATO forces in Europe in which Kennedy lays out the sequence of authorized responses to Soviet provocations over Berlin, up to and including the use of nuclear weapons, is particularly chilling. Most striking to the modern ear is Kennedy's ability to set forth specific and carefully considered policies in crisp, clear sentences, a talent that has been in short supply at the upper levels of American politics for quite some time.
Though remarkably comprehensive for its limited length, more of Kennedy's voice would have served Sandler’s purpose better.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60819-271-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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
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