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JOSEPH McCARTHY

REEXAMINING THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF AMERICA'S MOST HATED SENATOR

A combative corrective to the view of McCarthy as red-baiting demagogue that finds the true villains in the liberal establishment and the mainstream media. Using archival materials from the former USSR and declassified US materials, Herman (History/George Mason Univ.) offers evidence validating McCarthy’s anti-Communist pursuits: Alger Hiss, the US Army, pro-Communist federal employees. Most satisfying are his Senate scenes, which have the page-turning life of an Allan Drury novel. But overriding these virtues is the tortuous string of narrow characterizations that make much of the book read like a radio talk-show transcript. FDR envoy to Russia Harry Hopkins is a “Communist dupe,— J. Robert Oppenheimer “a conscious Soviet asset,— General Douglas MacArthur’s insubordination to President Truman “a daring experiment.” Predictably, those most responsible for unseating McCarthy are the most radically revised targets. Rather than acting as a moral barometer, Army counsel Joseph Welch is a crafty Eastern Establishment regular mainly interested in how he appeared on TV. Edward R. Murrow is no beacon of truth but an opportunist whose manipulative McCarthy interviews are central to “the modern media’s exalted self-image.” One of the few events escaping revision is McCarthy’s physical attack on adversarial columnist Drew Pearson: The knee in the groin and flattening slap are registered with disapproval. Herman’s own rhetorical punches point to his reductionist definition of the McCarthy era—a battle pitting atheist commie liberals against churchgoing moral conservatives. This limits the author’s credibility and discounts human complexity. To his credit, Herman provides a more distanced view than Richard Rovere did in his benchmark 1959 biography; yet Herman’s relentless politicizing deprives McCarthy of the dignity of a fallen man. A well-researched but hectoring book that fails to redeem McCarthy and antagonizes readers through its reductionist views of the American people. Librarians, prepare for opinion-blackened margins; readers, argue and run—to more balanced historians.

Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-684-83625-4

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Free Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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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