A game attempt by historian Hamby (Ohio Univ.) to replace the Oval Office bantamweight of political iconography with a more ambitious and self-doubting but able steward of the presidency. A self-described sissy who ran away from boyhood fights, Truman only managed to carve out an independent identity after the death of his demanding father by braving enemy fire as a WW I captain, winning longtime love Bess Wallace, and latching onto the Pendergast political machine in Kansas City. So wounded was he by this struggle to achieve respect and to remain personally honest in his compromised political environment that he would frequently suffer from exhaustion, unleash his fury in memos never sent to the offending parties, and diminish his presidential stature with erratic outbursts. In old age, Truman would gild events with nostalgic embellishments, such as an account of a 1920s Missouri campaign in which he faced down a Ku Klux Klan attempt at armed intimidation. Yet Hamby also celebrates Truman's presidency for the accomplishments usually hailed by historians, notably civil rights (in which Truman's better instincts about equality before the law won out over southern prejudice) and his defense of Western Europe as the Iron Curtain descended. Perhaps in reaction to David McCullough's Truman (1992), which he criticizes for failing to provide historical perspective, Hamby includes excellent analyses of Truman's difficulties in keeping together the loose New Deal coalition and his vacillation before recognizing Israel. Yet the author sometimes misplaces emphasis (e.g., he gives as much space to Truman's early venture capital fiascoes as to his 1948 ``whistle-stop campaign''), he provides no background on the key decision to desegregate the armed forces, and occasionally jumps to conclusions. A cool, highly nuanced examination of Truman's cultural and political milieus, but sadly lacking in the pace and narrative shape of McCullough's Pulitzer Prizewinning biography.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-19-504546-7
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
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 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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