A damning account of an unaccountable caste.
In which the rich get richer—and ever more powerful.
There was a time when the bottom 90 percent of American earners held more wealth than the richest 1 percent. That time, investigative journalist and policy analyst Michel writes, ran from 1946 to 2005. It’s been the other way around ever since, even as (and because) the tax rates on the rich have been steadily lowered. Naturally, that’s been at the behest of the rich themselves, who, by his account, command the government just as they do the economy. “If you live in a nation ruled by the wealthiest,” he bluntly observes, “then you live in an oligarchy, full stop.” Under such a system, that rule need not be overt or even formal, but it hinges on several premises, including the fact that the richest Americans, if threatened with higher taxes, “would have no problem seizing a country’s democracy by the throat, strangling it until it goes their way.” So it is in this new Gilded Age—the old one, Michel writes pointedly, having been marked by far less inequality than its current incarnation. For all that, his narrative gathers steam in that earlier era, when robber barons, such as Sanford Dole, engineered the American conquest of Hawaii and Andrew Carnegie summoned the military to break strikes at his factories. Some of those excesses were curbed when Theodore Roosevelt instituted anti-oligarchical measures, including raising income and inheritance taxes that eventually reached rates of 60 percent. Ronald Reagan undid all that, and, from there on, as Michel chronicles, the wealthiest have captured ever greater wealth while normalizing dark money in politics, relaxing regulations on commerce, and rewarding themselves with numerous other political and economic privileges that they no longer bother to conceal. We can put an end to that inequality, Michel concludes, by instituting a wealth tax, which “would be as American as apple pie or baseball.”
A damning account of an unaccountable caste.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9781250430113
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: yesterday
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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