by Andrew Schlesinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 27, 2005
Still, a nice commencement gift, if, say, your neighbor’s kid happens to be graduating from Harvard.
Journalist and filmmaker Schlesinger, son and grandson of Harvard professors, charts the history of the college in Cambridge from its founding days to the present.
At its best, Veritas shows how America changed Harvard and how Harvard changed America. Take the American Revolution: Harvard luminaries played key roles in the fight for liberty, yet, because of a concomitant drop in enrollment and in funds, the Revolution imperiled the college’s very existence. Throughout, Schlesinger follows a few intriguing themes: the increasing dependence of the university on federal funds, the expanding place of African-Americans in Harvard Yard, the school’s struggles to define the appropriate role of religion in the Harvard experience. And he’s to be commended for refusing to paper over some of the uglier aspects of the Harvard past. He describes, for example, the anti-Semitism harbored by many students and administrators during the 1920s. But his interest in the extracurricular activities of future American presidents—that Theodore Roosevelt rode horses and “got intoxicated at least once,” that FDR didn’t make the football team and golfed instead, that JFK served as chairman of the committee to organize the Freshman Smoker—adds little. Moreover, Schlesinger often misses opportunities to present a sustained interpretation, instead simply stringing together related anecdotes. Consider the chapter called “Harvard and the War Against Slavery.” Rather than making an argument about the impact Harvard as an institution had on the political debates of the antebellum era, the author offers a laundry list of alumni and faculty activities during the years before and during the Civil War: several grads helped found the Free Soil party, alum Robert Gould Shaw served as colonel of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, President Lincoln’s son enrolled at Harvard in 1860 and spent the war years studying Dante and smoking. The result is an exercise in antiquarianism.
Still, a nice commencement gift, if, say, your neighbor’s kid happens to be graduating from Harvard.Pub Date: May 27, 2005
ISBN: 1-56663-636-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. edited by Andrew Schlesinger and Stephen Schlesinger
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 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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979
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
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by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales
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by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez
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by Howard Zinn
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