Podhoretz the Younger—former White House apparatchik, son of Norman, and debut author—sheds some harsh light on the Executive Branch and, with some heat and a lot of wit, explains just what George Bush and other inquiring minds would like to know: what changed and how the Bushes lost the key to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. If Reagan wore Teflon, says Podhoretz, his preppy Veep became the Velcro President. Everything stuck to Bush because ``understanding was not his strong suit.'' The author argues persuasively that Bush (unlike his predecessor) ``didn't believe in anything very much except that he wanted to be president.'' Never mind the vision thing: Bush never meant what he said. That's why he laid a gigantic egg in the Oval Office, snatching defeat from the jaws of the Desert Storm victory and a favorable rating of 91% in the polls. Throughout his lively text, Podhoretz provides a valuable primer in the workings of the White House, where the West Wing is nothing more than a political bucket shop, inflating the stock of the ``president'' (always uncapitalized here). Updating Peggy Noonan and Don Regan, Podhoretz lets us in on the antics of Sununu and Darman at early morning staff meetings. He reveals the phone number used by staffers everywhere to reach anyone anywhere, and he tells which Cabinet secretary was easy to dominate ``because it is never difficult to outwit a dimwit.'' He takes us to the awful 1992 Republican Convention and the ``worst-run campaign in presidential history...led by a man who believed he deserved a second term because, damn it, he just did, that's all.'' Interspersed are abstract portraits of real, though nameless, staffers and their suffering (along with the Prez, of course, a lot of loyal functionaries suddenly became unemployed). A frisky if cautionary saga of political decline and fall, as well as a diverting backstairs tour related by a perceptive and irreverent conservative.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-79648-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993
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
