Diverting but ultimately tiresome—not be confused with a true history of the Cold War.
A pop-history chronicle of fear and distrust during the Cold War years.
In this sprawling, anecdote-laden account, journalist and Emmy Award–winning TV producer Brown (Ring Force, 2012, etc.) recalls the most outlandish moments of the years 1946 to 1989, when geopolitical tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union dominated world events. The period pitted “capitalism versus communism, the God-fearing versus the atheists, the force of light battling the forces of darkness,” writes the author, producing a paranoia reflected in the final warning of Hollywood’s The Thing From Another World (1951): “Keep watching the skies!” The resulting four-decade drama, spurred by the “overhyped menace of communism,” included the Truman loyalty program, the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, and the arms and space races, with an incendiary cast including Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, Richard Nixon, and many others. All of this will be familiar to most readers. Writing with plenty of attitude (“The men in the Kremlin were running a bullshit factory”), Brown lumps together colorful, disparate moments of the period—e.g., UFO sightings, the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, FBI claims of a communist plot behind the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, and the Cuban missile crisis—in ways that seem more exploitive than illuminating. Quotes from serious historians offer some perspective, but Brown’s eye is on the sheer spectacle of noisy conflicts and controversies. He sometimes swerves off course to discuss violence (from Dirty Harry to Charles Manson), supernatural terror (The Exorcist), and magical thinking (the Bermuda Triangle) as well as air disasters, gas shortages, and other calamities of the period. These matters apparently popped up during his extensive online research, conducted while “wearing sweats, picking my nose [and] noshing on pretzels.”
Diverting but ultimately tiresome—not be confused with a true history of the Cold War.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5387-2803-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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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