It’s been well-trod ground for the past 40 years, and this work will add little to the copious literature already out there.
The domestic side of Camelot in words and pictures—familiar fare—from presidential historian Anthony (Florence Harding, 1998, etc.).
No presidency has received greater scrutiny than Kennedy’s, and here, Anthony continues the tradition, this time with special emphasis on family life. Beginning with Kennedy’s inauguration and moving in rough chronological order through his abbreviated regime, Anthony regales with vignettes aimed at situating the First Family in the culture of the time and illuminating their individual personalities. He takes particular care to evoke the atmosphere of the early ’60s and to examine the Kennedys’ significance as the original celebrity First Couple of the Media Age. While not ignoring the reputed darker side of the administration, the author still treats his subjects with a notable degree of sympathy. He highlights not only the president’s charm but also his problematic relationship with his father. But his particular sympathy is reserved for Jackie, who not only had to deal with a faithless husband but with her own idealized public image as well. (Her attempts to protect the privacy of her children while the White House used the image of the young family as a political asset is well documented here.) As with any narrative of the domestic life of a family, the blow-by-blow accounts of particular events can make for pretty dull reading. The descriptions of the weather on inauguration day, Jackie’s decorating choices, and the First Families’ collective impact on fashion are likely to hold the attention of only the most star-struck of Kennedy admirers.
It’s been well-trod ground for the past 40 years, and this work will add little to the copious literature already out there.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-2221-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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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