A sparkling collection that frames each of the particular contributions anew.
Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist Krauthammer collects 30 years of his work.
The author is well-known for the pungency and forcefulness with which he expresses his political views, which have led some, like the Financial Times, to rate him “the most influential columnist in America.” His starting point is the reaffirmation of his commitment to politics, “the crooked timber of our communal lives [which] dominates everything because, in the end, everything—high and low and, most especially, high—lives or dies by politics.” Krauthammer’s autobiography emerges in chapters organized around themes like “Follies,” “Man and God,” “The Jewish Question, Again” and “Three Essays on America and the World.” Educated in medicine and psychiatry, the author came to Washington, D.C., to work for the Carter administration. He began to write for the New Republic and the Washington Post and found a new direction for his career. Presenting himself as a charming polymath, he writes on a variety of subjects, not just politics—e.g., a defense of the border collie as a working breed from the American Kennel Club, where it was admitted in 1994. Krauthammer draws on his scientific training to examine the arguments surrounding both creationism and global warming, and his interest in world championship chess and mathematics helps him ably convey the magic of the convergence of science and art in monumental expressions of man's political concerns and strivings. Among other topics, Krauthammer explores Washington's Holocaust Museum, New York's Hayden Planetarium (“it wraps an enormous cube around interior curves and spheres, just as science creates the lines that give order and solidity to the bending ephemera of nature”), NASA, Winston Churchill, the Transportation Security Administration, Woody Allen, ground zero and Social Security, which is not just “a Ponzi scheme,” but “also the most vital, humane and fixable of all social programs.”
A sparkling collection that frames each of the particular contributions anew.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-385-34917-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown Forum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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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