There’s little here that previous lives and histories have missed, but Cerami spins a good historical tale.
The second string comes in to close the game, and the Revolution is completed.
The title sounds like an Emilio Estevez vehicle, and indeed this latest by Cerami (Jefferson’s Great Gamble, 2003) has its cinematic moments: mix up Jefferson in Paris with 84 Charing Cross Road, and there’s at least a chunk of the story. Cerami’s concern is to document a brief period of postrevolutionary collaboration between Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, respectively the lieutenants of George Washington and James Madison, who were keen to replace the Articles of Confederation with something more potent: the Constitution they eventually devised. Madison was keenly aware of the weakness of the government, for, Cerami writes, during the Revolution it was his job to touch a little known Jewish banker, Haym Solomon, for loans to keep the army afloat. (“Haym Solomon obstinately rejects all recompense,” Madison wrote.) No loans, no army, no revolution: it was Alexander Hamilton’s genius that gave the Constitution its provisions for a centralized treasury to fund such things as wars, since Hamilton’s most sincere desire “was to design every move the government made as a symbol of perfect trust, so that the country’s money and its credit would be unquestioned.” Agreeing on much, Madison and Hamilton would come to part ways as their leaders split into federalist and antifederalist factions; but one of the things they could not effectively do even as allies, Cerami reveals, was to introduce a mechanism to eliminate slavery in the new republic. And neither paid much concern to a bill of rights, snorting at those who feared “the tyranny of Philadelphia”—that is to say, Congress. Both Hamilton and Madison were on shaky political ground in their home states, Cerami writes, but there in Philadelphia they did much to give the Constitution its form and to make the U.S. a nation of laws, if sometimes confused and incomplete ones.
There’s little here that previous lives and histories have missed, but Cerami spins a good historical tale.Pub Date: July 5, 2005
ISBN: 1-4022-0235-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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