A brilliant book, likely to be for some time the last word on how the American map evolved.
A Pulitzer Prize–winner comprehensively documents America’s expansion—one audacious land swindle, one gunpoint accession, one bloody conquest after another.
Not until the 1840s did a journalist memorably codify the grandiose notion, traceable to the most illustrious among our Founders, of “manifest destiny.” By then, of course, fighting off threats from at least four European powers, the great American land-grab was well underway, with the “backlands” of the 13 original colonies already carved up by the Northwest Ordinance, Louisiana purchased and Florida seized. Still to come was the annexation of the Texas Republic and the Mexican War, which pushed our boundaries still farther south and west, and the muscling of Britain out of the Oregon Territory; there followed Seward’s Folly, the purchase of Alaska from Russia, the eventual annexation of Hawaii and the high-water mark of American imperialism, the Spanish-American War, resulting in the acquisition of Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. Covering all this and more, Kluger’s deeply researched, smoothly erudite narrative sickens even as it informs. Look away if you cannot bear the sight of America repeatedly betraying its professed ideals, building a nation on the backs of slaves, exterminating a native population. As his slyly sardonic subtitle suggests, Kluger (Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris, 1996, etc.) identifies few heroes in a story where even our greatest leaders (all cloaking their acts in the most high-flown rhetoric) succumbed to land-fever, safeguarding and enriching the republic by their unconstitutional acts, manufactured wars, repeatedly broken treaties and sometimes deceptive, other times arm-twisting diplomacy. Indeed, by the terms of Kluger’s relentlessly moralistic discussion, our greatest presidents were Cleveland, for his staunch refusal to sign off on a U.S.-led coup in Hawaii, and Carter, for his give-back of the Panama Canal. Still, by dint of his impeccable scholarship, Kluger has earned his virtuous tone.
A brilliant book, likely to be for some time the last word on how the American map evolved.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-41341-4
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
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 Yorkerstaff 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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