This is the third volume in Schlesinger's study The Age of Roosevelt, and it continues the domestic history of the F.D.R. administration. It is a masterful and absorbing discussion of the ideological, economic and political life of the years 1933-1936, in relation to the aims and functions of the New Deal. The beginning of the New Deal found a people in despair- shaken, disillusioned, apathetic — a propitious moment for demagogues and rabble-rousers. Beating drums they came- Father Coughlin, Gerald K. Smith, Dr. Townsend Huey Long. All had panaceas for despair while need and want clouded the senses of the public. Some were swayed by the peculiar appeal of the fascist-inspired crackpots (still to be found today) and there was the adulation of Hitler and Mussolini by men such as Hearst who, like McCarthy in a later decade, spearheaded the anti-communist scares of the '30's. There was the consolidation of divers political thought, the delineation of the radicals and progressives, the intellectual discovery of communism and socialism; and, shaping the emergency legislation of the new American government, the experimental pragmatism of the New Deal. Here the character and quality of the men who drove the New Deal are incisively portrayed, and Schlesinger's interpretation of the facts is always logical, astute and psychologically sound. Seen in perspective the struggles and victories of this program seem gargantuan. And Schlesinger is one of our most sophisticated historians as he attempts again to interpret history in terms of the meaning and function of democracy. It is exciting material and particularly pertinent on the eve of the election to come.
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1960
ISBN: 0618340874
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1960
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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