An often fascinating, if uneven, glimpse into the world of a bestselling author.
A disdainful biography of popular psychiatrist Morgan Scott Peck (1936-2005) by journalist Jones (The National Catholic Reporter at Fifty, 2014, etc.).
Peck, the author of 15 books, is best known for his debut, the groundbreaking 1978 bestseller The Road Less Traveled: a New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth. The work catapulted Peck from being a private-practice psychiatrist to a celebrity who commanded exorbitant fees on speaking tours. Jones traces Peck’s childhood and young adulthood before skipping to his years as a writer and speaker, finally focusing on his last years. He writes that Peck’s wealthy “WASP” upbringing in midcentury New York City informed his entire life. Peck’s troubled relationships with his domineering father and bullying older brother, in Jones’ opinion, dictated Peck’s future neuroses: “Peck was a control freak with an addictive personality, a narcissist with a gift,” he writes. (Other people he quotes in this book similarly characterize Peck as self-centered.) Educated at top-tier pillars of education, including Phillips Exeter Academy, Middlebury College, and Harvard University, Peck broke free from the East Coast by attending medical school in Cleveland, Ohio. By then, he’d married Lily Ho, a Chinese woman, to his parents’ disapproval; her parents equally opposed the marriage. He joined the Army, and, after several years of living as a military family, the couple and their three children settled in Connecticut—mere miles from Peck’s childhood summer home. Overall, Jones’ account of Peck’s life, a revised version of his 2007 book The Road He Travelled, provides readers with an engaging look into 20th-century U.S. history, from Peck’s father’s association with John Foster Dulles at law firm Sullivan & Cromwell to Peck’s own service during the Vietnam War. However, there’s some unevenness in Jones’ telling of the events of Peck’s life, as it focuses heavily on Peck’s childhood and dysfunctional family relationships, then glosses over decades to spend an inordinate amount of time recounting Peck’s last year and the feud between Peck’s second wife, Kathy, and his executive secretary, Gail Puterbaugh. Jones’ prose style also tends to time-hop; for example, it makes reference to Peck’s divorce from his wife Lily before he’s even married to her and then gives the divorce itself quick treatment when it occurs chronologically. As a result, readers may hunger to discover what Jones left out.
An often fascinating, if uneven, glimpse into the world of a bestselling author.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Capparoe Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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