Well written, thoroughly researched: likely to stand as the definitive portrait of Smith for years to come.
A rock-solid biography of the muckraking New York politician.
Though he bore the sobriquet “the happy warrior,” Al Smith (1873–1944) took anything but a lighthearted approach to politics. He harbored, writes Finan (president of the American Booksellers’ Foundation for Free Expression), a “distrust of theory” in an age when big ideas abounded and instead was convinced that the “first step to solving any problem was to get ‘the facts’.” His careful, studious approach to politics was learned on the job after an unlikely elevation from his former occupation as a laborer at New York’s Fulton Fish Market. Taken up by a Tammany ward boss, Smith soon became an integral part of the city’s political machine, securing the support of fellow Irish Catholics. Populist but essentially conservative, he won the governorship in 1918, dismaying the social elite that ruled Albany. Around this time he became a valuable ally of Franklin Roosevelt, though FDR harbored his own ambitions and eventually turned on Smith, ostensibly in the interests of anti-boss system reform but in fact in the interests of the patrician, anti-immigrant, and anti-Catholic wing of the Democratic Party. Angry at Roosevelt’s “dodging” on Prohibition, Smith endured a sound defeat at Herbert Hoover’s hands in the presidential election of 1928, then became a prominent critic of the New Deal after FDR beat Hoover in 1932. For this supposed betrayal, he was shunned by his fellow Democrats and was subsequently all but forgotten by historians. That’s all to the bad, Finan argues; Smith’s mistrust of big government is a familiar trope today, his political accomplishments were many, and had he been elected, “he may well have become one of the country’s great presidents.”
Well written, thoroughly researched: likely to stand as the definitive portrait of Smith for years to come.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8090-3033-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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
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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