A thorough, persuasive, insightful study of Obama’s life and political achievements.
An exploration of the moderate ideology of America’s 44th president.
Biographer and former history professor Kaufman argues that Obama’s inveterate pragmatism and conservative values have been “generally ignored in the existing literature.” As a corrective, he offers a perspective that underscores how a respect for “individual responsibility, hard work, and a free market” guided the former president throughout his political career. This approach guides the author’s convincing, often refreshing assessment of Obama’s decision-making and helps illuminate the resistance to his presidency from both the left and right as he sought to “maintain the nation’s existing free enterprise system rather than replace it with a more powerful centralized government.” Kaufman tracks Obama’s intellectual growth from his childhood through his years as a law student and community organizer, and he highlights his motivations behind key decisions during his two terms as president. “What differentiated his administration from others before him were his efforts to expand opportunities to enter the middle class for those he regarded as not yet part of it,” writes the author. Of particular interest is the emphasis placed on Obama’s sometimes-ruthless pragmatism in achieving the political ends he valued most, a characteristic that has indeed been neglected by other commentators. Also revealing are Kaufman’s sharp critiques of Obama’s Middle East policies, including “his misunderstanding of the Arab Spring beginning in 2010, his intervention in Libya, and questionable response to the Syrian Civil War.” The author’s largest claim is that “future historians and biographers will evaluate Obama as one of the nation’s best post–World War II presidents along with Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower.” Though Kaufman doesn’t systematically defend this judgment, it informs his appraisal of what he takes to be the former president’s greatest success, the passing of the Affordable Care Act, which epitomized his commitment to moderate reform.
A thorough, persuasive, insightful study of Obama’s life and political achievements.Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5017-6197-3
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Cornell Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
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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