A two-volume safari into the paths of America's intellectual evolution, one which cuts some whackingly good, and not-so-good, swaths from the Colonial wilderness to the New Frontier. Most of the essayists are connected in one way or another with Harvard, Columbia and the White House; thus the book as a whole has what one of the editors calls "coherence and correspondence"; what that amounts to in point of fact and in point of view is a sort of socio-cultural rundown of the liberal democrats — or that set of references and preferences generally shared by members of the Kennedy Administration. Such a critical consensus is, of course, not bad at all, (though one might have suggested Louis Hacker as a fitter interpreter of "laissez-faire" than Max Lerner, and certainly Dwight MacDonald could have given a more unsettling account of "mass culture" than the one we get from Daniel Bell-but that's neither here nor there). What really bothers this reader is how much of the ground covered- politics, law, literature, economics, science, philosophy, religion, history- seems always to be just getting into the underbrush when the exploration stops and off we go on another jaunt, another essay. Among the real hunters; Seymour Harris' grapplings with Keynesianism, Kazin on the Realistic Novel, White on Pragmatism; among the touch-and-go group: Schlesinger's New Deal survey, Shils on Sociology, McGeorge Bundy on Internationalism. Still, a revealing, rewarding good general guide.
Pub Date: Sept. 17, 1963
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1963
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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.
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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