by William Seale ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2013
A well-polished, lustrous piece of American history.
White House History editor Seale (The Garden Club of America's One Hundred Years of a Growing Legacy, 2013, etc.) takes the reader on a tour through the nation's corridors of power during the decades when Washington, D.C., emerged as a truly world capital.
The author has written extensively about the White House and many other historical American buildings. Here, he weaves together separate narrative threads about international affairs, diplomatic and political history, culture, architecture and city building. His starting point is April 11, 1893, the day that British ambassador Sir Julian Pauncefote presented his credentials to President Grover Cleveland. The upgrade from minister plenipotentiary to ambassador meant the U.S. president would henceforth be recognized as a head of state like others. “Quietly, symbolically,” writes Seale, “the White House ceremony marked the beginning of a new age for the mighty North American democracy.” The author traces the changes that flowed from such a development, while introducing the people who made it all possible. The U.S. moved to assert its new position and prepared to establish its global power in partnership and competition with the U.K. and against the Spanish. Men like Alvey Adee, a long-serving official in the State Department, John Hay, Lincoln's former private secretary, and historian and journalist Henry Adams formed a circle of friendship, which helped the change. Meanwhile, the nation's architects believed America's new global position merited the reassessment of questions of the design of the capitol building and the kinds of architectural themes that would dominate public building. Officials dusted off Pierre Charles L'Enfant's original designs and had marble from Vermont and elsewhere shipped into the capital to build Union Station, the Smithsonian Institution and many other iconic structures. The capital's social life and fashions were transformed accordingly.
A well-polished, lustrous piece of American history.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-58834-391-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Smithsonian Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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