A worthy treatment of recovery movements in American history, unsung heroes and all.
An appropriately harrowing account of booze and its discontents.
Alcohol has been with us always and, with it, day-after regrets. One early regret, writes Finan (From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America, 2007, etc.), director of the American Booksellers for Free Expression, came from a Seneca leader named Handsome Lake, who saw what ravages alcohol was wreaking among his people and preached a gospel of abstinence: “Whiskey is the great engine which the bad Spirit uses to introduce Witchcraft and may other evils amongst Indians.” So effective was the message that Handsome Lake was able to deter a generation of followers. Today, Native people, as well as Americans of all ethnicities, turn to AA for help, and Finan tells a respectful, demythologized version of the story of Bill Wilson and Bob Smith, who founded the organization in an effort to keep each other sober after some scarifying cold-turkey moments led them to realize “that they had been at their lowest point when they discovered a power greater than themselves that made it possible for them to stop drinking.” Some of Finan’s case studies are a little repetitive and tedious, but they all add up to a trajectory of recognition that alcohol is a cause of social and physical harm, with huge repercussions. The author notes that whereas AA members cloaked themselves in anonymity precisely because of the prejudice against hiring drunks, whether wet or dry, alcoholism has lost some of its stigma as it has been recognized as a medical condition. With that, however, peer support has given way to professionalized treatment, crowding out “the sober alcoholics who had once played such a prominent role as counselors.” Finan closes with a gimlet-eyed look at some of AA’s alternatives, including the recent movement to transform alcoholic drinking into social drinking, forgoing the old model of complete abstinence.
A worthy treatment of recovery movements in American history, unsung heroes and all.Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0179-0
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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 Yorker staff 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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