A work that knowledgeably situates the pioneering of a nasty new style of politics.
A well-focused academic study of how the California agriculture business helped spur the conservative backlash against New Deal policies.
Olmsted (Chair, History/Univ. of California, Davis; Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11, 2009, etc.) finds in Depression-era California the crucible for strong-arm policies against farm workers that bolstered the conservative movement. A key omission in the New Deal’s early recovery programs for the faltering economy was protection of farm laborers for the same reason, the author notes, they were later excluded from the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act: “powerful Southern Democrats wanted to maintain control over their tenant farmers and sharecroppers.” In California, in particular, the agricultural leaders were both grateful for the subsidies offered by the Agricultural Adjustment Act and determined to bust the unions encouraged by the New Deal. In successive strikes across the state led by prominent communist union organizers like Pat Chambers and Caroline Decker in 1933, as the crops ripened in the fields, harvesters refused to work, hoping to raise wages. In response, the powerful growers would instigate all sorts of intimidation tactics and arrests, and they began to organize themselves—e.g., in the Associated Farmers, a group that “spread the word about the Communist threat.” The agitation prompted bohemian writer sympathizers like John Steinbeck, Ella Winter, and Lincoln Steffens to alert a national audience to the strikers’ cause in their work. One example was Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle (1936), although, curiously, he eliminated people of color and women to showcase only white men’s struggles. Olmsted examines the federal response in the form of labor chief Frances Perkins’ associate, Gen. Pelham Glassford, who was sent into the Imperial Valley to solve labor disputes, recognizing that “growers were no better than thugs.” The author also discusses the rise of professional political consultants and leaders like Richard Nixon, who perfected the smear campaign.
A work that knowledgeably situates the pioneering of a nasty new style of politics.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62097-096-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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
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