In a literature overflowing with melodramatic, and often overblown, accounts by the likes of Brokaw and Ambrose, this...
Veteran Chicago Tribune columnist Greene (Duty, 2000, etc.) takes a lively, affectionate look at small-town America through the lens of a most unusual institution.
North Platte, Nebraska, is one of those places that flashes by on the interstate, a typical wayside venue of fast-food restaurants, chain stores, and a decaying downtown, superficially “just another interchangeable part of a bland and homogenized America in which Connecticut is no different from Texas.” Six decades ago, the town made much more of an impression upon thousands of young American men who, passing through on troop trains en route to war in Europe or the Pacific, were treated at its station canteen to cigarettes, fresh food, hot coffee, and plenty of hospitality. “This was not something orchestrated by the government,” Greene writes. “This was not paid for with public money. All the food, all the services, all the hours of work were volunteered by private citizens and local businesses”—with, he adds, the exception of a five-dollar donation made by President Roosevelt, who had heard about the place and wanted to pay his respects. In the course of this searching portrait, Greene wanders around North Platte, visiting with elderly veterans of the canteen and WWII, examining how the citizens’ generosity and caring made a world of difference to all those young men so many years ago. (He also includes grateful letters written to the townspeople by soldiers and their parents.) Along the way, pointedly but subtly, Greene contrasts the North Platte and America of yesteryear with what they have become today. Asking himself whether an American town today would do what North Platte did then, he rejoins with a more elemental question: “What’s a town?”
In a literature overflowing with melodramatic, and often overblown, accounts by the likes of Brokaw and Ambrose, this pleasingly modest and meaningful account of life on the homefront deserves the widest audience.Pub Date: June 3, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-009387-0
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
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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