by Andrew Burstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 2001
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
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by Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg
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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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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