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PRACTICING HISTORY

SELECTED ESSAYS

The title is apt: Tuchman does indeed practice history as a lawyer practices law, or a doctor medicine; that is, she applies it—to the writing of involving narratives, to the drawing of contemporary judgments. These selected essays are not, then, contributions to the advancement of knowledge—with two possible exceptions. The first section consists of discussions of craft; the second chiefly of occasional pieces and book reviews; the third of timely views—responses, mainly, to Vietnam and Watergate. In sum, a Tuchman retrospective, 1936-1980. Seven of the eight pieces on craft turn out, moreover, to be arguments for Tuchman's kind of history-writing (the eighth is a graceful bow to research libraries). "Primarily I think of the historian as a storyteller"—utilizing only primary sources, always supplying corroborative detail, featuring public figures ("with power to affect destiny"), arriving "at theory by way of the evidence": all this in distinction, variously, to "the way of the Ph.D.," the "professional historian," the theorist. But there are internal contradictions nonetheless—cracks in this let-the-facts-speak facade. At one point Tuchman pooh-poohs the proposition (of E. H. Carr) that "historical facts do not exist independently of the interpretations of historians"; two years later she is writing (in "The Historian's Opportunity"): "Events happen; but to become history they must be communicated and understood." What she fails to acknowledge is the extent to which selection of evidence—even the focus on prominent individuals—is ipso facto interpretation. Against these observations on method and technique, the second section becomes a display of Tuchman's craft as well as a record of her interests. Three post-college pieces, written for The Nation (which Tuchman's father owned), demonstrate that she was capable of writing as infectiously as others about an FDR campaign train and as foolishly about the "incomprehensible," illogical Japanese; and that she was incapable of writing a nuanced, Genêt-like evocation of Civil-War Madrid. A narrative involving a quasi-American kidnapped by the Berbers is good historical entertainment; but it also highlights Tuchman's stylistic excesses: the airless thicket of vivid detail, the string of curious particulars culminating—surprise!—in a crucial one. Two 1967 articles on Israel exactly reflect the then-prevailing euphoria; a related book review occasions conventional, uncomprehending criticism of Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" thesis. But Tuchman's American-Jewish Establishment roots are also the basis of one of the two stellar pieces: a profile of her grandfather Henry Morgen-thau, Sr.—first-generation achiever, friend of Palestinian settlement, foe of political Zionism—entitled "The Dilemma of the Assimilationist." The second standout, "If Mao Had Come to Washington," draws on what may be Tuchman's most lasting work—her researches into, and evaluation of, the putative American "loss" of China to the Communists (for, of course, her Stilwell book). Here, a tantalizing, obscure incident is not presented as a Great Lost Opportunity, and a salient, "quirky" figure—pro-Chiang Ambassador Hurley—is not seen as Destiny's operative. "Our course was destined," Tuchman writes, "by ourselves and our inclinations." There are pieces of passing merit (the review of Kissinger's memoirs, for one); some post-Vietnam and -Watergate policy recommendations (foremost: "some form of shared executive power"); some sidelights, of likely interest to Tuchman readers, on the writing of her histories. But only the Mao piece would hold its own in any context.

Pub Date: Sept. 14, 1981

ISBN: 0345303636

Page Count: 306

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1981

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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.

Awards & Accolades

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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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