A vivid reconstruction of a turning point in the history of right-wing extremism in America.
A book that links modern political movements to Reagan-era fundamentalist Christian theology.
The 1992 standoff at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, has largely been forgotten. Jennings, the author of Paradise Now (2016), revives the story with the moment that touched off tragedy: Survivalist Randy Weaver had holed up with his family in a mountain retreat, and, having essentially entrapped him in an illegal gun sale, the FBI came looking for him. A dog was killed, then a 14-year-old boy, then an agent, after which Ruby Ridge became the site of a siege in which Randy’s wife died. While the agency never admitted overreach, the FBI quietly settled with the survivors, Randy among them, some years after the standoff. Jennings links this event to the popular “dispensationalist” theology filling the airwaves at the time courtesy of televangelists such as Pat Robertson, which, among other things, promulgated the argument that because Jesus was going to return any day now, there was no need to fret about nuclear war, environmental degradation, and the like—apocalyptic views endorsed by President Reagan and numerous members of his cabinet. “If earthly conditions are supposed to be growing worse,” writes Jennings, “then all the old hopeful schemes for sprucing things up come to resemble schemes of a more sinister nature.” So the Weavers apparently thought, and so did the Branch Davidians who came under siege a year later, and so, Jennings suggests, do subscribers to QAnon mythology today. In any event, as Jennings writes, the Weavers became martyrs to the Christian nationalist cause, the Charlie Kirks of their day, “saints of circumstance, beatified by the calamity that landed upon their heads.” The antigovernment stance of the Weavers and their supporters lives on, too; as Jennings writes, “Three decades on, Ruby Ridge looks more like the start of something than its finale.”
A vivid reconstruction of a turning point in the history of right-wing extremism in America.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780316381949
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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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