Irish scholar and former diplomat O'Brien (Ancestral Voices, 1995, etc.) examines two dark sides of the Jeffersonian legacy: his enthusiasm for the French Revolution, and his support for the slave-based Southern economy. O'Brien argues that Jefferson's tenure as an American diplomat in Paris during the last years of the ancien rÇgime were not happy. Unlike Benjamin Franklin, he was not popular in Paris, nor did he seem much enthused by the French ally. However, he was excited by the French Revolution in 1789, so much so, O'Brien argues, that his political philosophy and career were transformed. Jefferson and his Republicans were not troubled by the excesses of the Reign of Terror, O'Brien argues, until the terror became a political liability. Also, because of his belief in revolution, Jefferson viewed with a benign eye such American insurrections as Shays' Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion. O'Brien argues that Jefferson's role in encouraging Citizen Gent in his attempts to undermine President Washington's policy of neutrality in European wars smacked of conspiracy. On the other hand, O'Brien contends, while Jefferson passionately advocated the egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution, he never seriously contemplated manumitting his own slaves. O'Brien argues that the egalitarian promise of the Declaration of Independence and Jefferson's many statements against slavery were partly intended for political consumption and concealed both a deep-rooted support for the Southern slave system and a profound racism. Jefferson was horrified at the violent uprising in Haiti, in which black slaves overthrew their white masters to found their own republic, which brought Jefferson's tendencies into conflict and ended his ``long affair'' with the French Revolution. On Jefferson's legacy to America, O'Brien ends by questioning the future status of a slaveholder with racist views in America's increasingly multicultural society. O'Brien makes a well-argued revisionist contribution to the literature on Jefferson.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-226-61653-3
Page Count: 385
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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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