A well-written, if limited, account of early American progress.
A history book focuses on American economic and scientific development through the mid-19th century.
Though centered on early United States history, this work’s purpose lies in reexamining contemporary problems related to endless war, economic inequality, and social unrest through the lens of American thinkers and leaders of yore. Like Chaitkin’s previous two books, including George Bush, the Unauthorized Biography (1992), this volume is a harsh indictment of today’s “Anglo-American Establishment” that rejected the U.S.’s historic embrace of protectionist and nationalist economic policies for free trade and globalism. As an activist formerly involved with Lyndon LaRouche’s eclectic political movement, the author has been a long-standing opponent of America’s deindustrialization and move toward "cheap labor," which he sees as leading to "systemic collapse." Though much of the book’s rhetoric against global elites and in favor of nationalism echoes the messages of Donald Trump’s America First movement, the 45th president takes a back seat to Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Henry Clay. To Chaitkin, Franklin’s embrace of nationalism and scientific development led not only to innovations like the steam engine that transformed America’s economic system, but also spurred England’s Industrial Revolution. Central to the work’s intriguing thesis is that Adam Smith’s brand of unregulated capitalism and Marx’s communist theory represent a false dichotomy, as Americans like Hamilton and Clay pointed citizens to a third option that blended a nationalist brand of economics that embraced tariffs with a strong federal government that actively pushed for fiscal progress through a national bank. Not all of the Founding Fathers receive adulation in this eloquent series opener. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, is labeled an “anti-Nationalist,” and Southern oligarchs are lambasted for both supporting slavery and seeking to maintain an antiquated socio-economic order more akin to “medieval feudalism” than Franklin’s vibrant, innovative republic. While this book is a captivating read based on sound primary source research, there is not much engagement with contemporary historical scholarship, such as Edward Baptist’s thesis on the importance of slavery to the development of America’s economy. Similarly, many economists may also bristle at the volume’s idealization of early-19th-century economics as a model for the present.
A well-written, if limited, account of early American progress. (picture credits, bibliography, index, acknowledgments, author bio)Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-69-702357-0
Page Count: 479
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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