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THE REAL AMERICAN DREAM

A MEDITATION ON HOPE

Reflections on American conceptions of happiness and hope—and of how they have grown weak. Originating in the William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard, this slim volume has the characteristics of the civilization about which its author reflects: it is large with desire and disheveled in its pursuit. Delbanco, a professor in humanities at Columbia (The Death of Satan, 1995; Required Reading, 1997), writes of the function of hope in creating the Christian and national narratives of American life. And, without adequately developing the juxtaposition, he insightfully contrasts the sustaining force of hope with the melancholy that comes with its absence. He does so through a quotation-filled review of much of American history—citing everyone from John Winthrop to today’s pundits. While he tries to distinguish himself from the Jeremiahs of right and left, in the end he lands about where they stand: deeply troubled by our inability to imagine a common destiny and to reattach our lives to a sense of moral progress. Confidence in such progress, he insists in his most striking assertion, nourished the pursuits of our greatest forebears, from the Puritans through Lincoln into figures of this century. But now such hopes are weak because our narrative and symbolic life, previously sustained by belief, first in God, then in nation, has become so impoverished. To have hope in ourselves alone is to have lost “the real American dream,” which was to share in some public responsibility, whether it was founding the kingdom of God on earth, preserving the Union, creating true equality, or pursuing more modest programs of reform, succor, and help. Unfortunately, the book possesses the attributes of the lectures from which it originated: it can only suggest and not demonstrate. Ranging learnedly and widely, this is less a work of scholarship, on which it is deeply based, than a personal testament to the melancholy to which learning has led its author.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-674-74925-1

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Harvard Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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