A top-notch historian brings together recondite research with felicitous prose. An excellent choice for students of...
An acclaimed historian examines the American presidency from 1901 to 2001.
Even though he was uninspiring, William McKinley, assassinated in 1901, was the “creator of the 20th-century presidency,” writes Leuchtenburg (Emeritus, History/Univ. of North Carolina; Herbert Hoover, 2006, etc.), who chronicles the entire presidential gallery across the 20th century. So what made McKinley so modern? Not only was he the first to ride in an automobile, appear in motion pictures, and use the telephone, but he set up a table for reporters to brief them daily and pursued a more imperial executive style in deploying American troops on his own authority. This greatly increased power of the presidency was new, as the country at that point was expanding hugely in terms of industry and population. With the accession of Theodore Roosevelt, the office became the famous “bully pulpit” of a muscular, progressive leader, not afraid to take on big business—e.g., J.P. Morgan’s Northern Securities Company, trustbusted by the Supreme Court in 1904. Woodrow Wilson, with his “stern demeanor and his kinetic energy,” was both revered for his idealism and vilified for the scarring of the World War I years. After the “Wilsonian usurpation,” writes Leuchtenburg, Congress was “in no mood to indulge a strong executive.” The country was content with Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover yet welcomed the activism during the Great Depression of Franklin Roosevelt, a transformative president when he had to become commander in chief of the armed forces, then engaged in “a global struggle against fascism.” What the author conveys so marvelously is the sense of how such seemingly ordinary Americans—e.g., Harry Truman, “a man so transparently unqualified”; Dwight Eisenhower, son of a storekeeper in Abilene, Kansas; the polarizing, paranoid Richard Nixon; good-natured Gerald Ford; peanut farmer Jimmy Carter—could bring majesty to the office.
A top-notch historian brings together recondite research with felicitous prose. An excellent choice for students of 20th-century American history.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-19-517616-2
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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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