The history of a Washington, D.C., residence that served as a crucible for liberal ideas and strategies.
In 1912, a row house in DuPont Circle was dubbed the “House of Truth” by its original residents: labor relations expert Robert G. Valentine and lawyers Winfred Denison, Loring Christie, and Felix Frankfurter. Through the years, many others made their home there: among them, outspoken journalist Walter Lippmann, one of the founders of the New Republic; and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Louis Brandeis, both of whom served on the Supreme Court. Lippmann, Holmes, Brandeis, and Frankfurter dominate Snyder’s (Law/Univ. of Wisconsin; A Well-Paid Slave: Curt Flood’s Fight for Free Agency in Professional Sports, 2006, etc.) richly detailed history of progressivism, which ends with Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932 and Holmes’ death in 1935. Drawing on a wealth of manuscript sources, the author traces the evolving alliances and views of his four passionate and influential protagonists. Except for Holmes, all believed “that government recognition of organized labor would create an industrial democracy.” Except for Holmes, they were Jewish, with varying connections to their heritages and responses to anti-Semitism, which was rampant in government, at Harvard, where Frankfurter taught, and a growing threat in Europe. Brandeis was a leader in American Zionism; Lippmann described Hitler as “the authentic voice of a civilized people.” Although Snyder depicts Holmes with warm admiration, the jurist emerges as a Victorian mired in the 19th century. Brandeis gently urged Holmes to read about “the pressing issues of the day,” but Holmes, Snyder writes, “loathed” facts. The author provides details of liberals’ involvement with each presidential aspirant and winner; with the Paris Peace Conference; with the notorious trial and executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, and many other social and political causes. At times, the sheer amount of information overwhelms the narrative, more appropriate for a reference source than a lively group biography. Nevertheless, the author’s focus on the significance of the Supreme Court makes the book unusually timely.
An accomplished, authoritative history of American liberalism.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-026198-6
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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