Burstein’s evocative reconstruction shows Americans pausing to consider where they had been and where they were going. (20...
An affecting portrait of the US on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
In this lyrical coda to Sentimental Democracy (1999), Burstein argues that a fondness for recasting history “continues to animate American political culture; it is at once as quaint as romance and as insidious as ideology.” He believes the videotape of American history paused briefly in the summer of 1826, when the nation looked back with deep gratitude to the Revolution and its heroes, some of whom (Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Adams) were still alive. Americans had elected John Quincy Adams president in a contest settled acrimoniously in the House of Representatives, but they had already begun to embrace the more democratic principles of Andrew Jackson, who would win the presidency in 1828. As a prologue, Burstein describes the extraordinarily emotional return to America in 1824–25 of revolutionary hero Lafayette. The old Frenchman toured each of the 24 states, where he was feted, saluted, and hugged by former comrades-in-arms, many of whom dissolved into tears. Burstein then takes us on a tour of American culture and politics. He acquaints us with the romantic fascination with death. He teaches us about the cheese industry, the building of the great canals, fashions in footwear. He brings to life the known (John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, John Randolph) and the lesser known (William Wirt, US Attorney General for 12 consecutive years; Ethan Allen Brown, an early Ohio governor; Eliza Foster, author of the now-obscure novel Yorktown). His accounts of the deaths of Jefferson and Adams, both of whom passed away on July 4, 1826, are deeply poignant, and provide a fitting coda for the work.
Burstein’s evocative reconstruction shows Americans pausing to consider where they had been and where they were going. (20 b&w illustrations, 2 maps)Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-41033-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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