Acerbic fun for political junkies.
A comic treatise on the unique customs of Potomac Man, that strange indigenous tribe inhabiting the area in and around Washington, D.C.
Composed in part of items previously posted in Milbank’s must-read Post column, “Washington Sketch,” the text offers an anthropological examination of the behaviour of the district’s political tribe, looking at its rites and rituals, how its members eat, where (and with whom) they sleep. Milbank hilariously compares the beliefs and rituals of primitive cultures with things that happen every day inside the Beltway. For instance, he juxtaposes the Melanesian practice of tribal Big Men purchasing political power and influence via lavish gifts (moka) with the questionable practices of the many lobbyists and influence peddlers who do business in the capital. Although many of these stories are common knowledge, others are not. For instance, did you hear the one about Jack Abramoff’s plan to serve a rare, cud-chewing (and thus kosher) Asian pig species at a deli he was planning on opening? Or about the vehemently anti–Michael Jackson memos Chief Justice John Roberts wrote when he was a lawyer with the Reagan administration? Or how Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, upset to be in the minority and thus without a committee chairmanship, set up his own fake Judiciary Committee in the basement of the Capital, sheet-draped witness tables and all? The political-tell-all-as-cultural study conceit wears surprisingly well; Milbank’s comparisons are sharp and funny enough to keep it fresh. If ever proof was needed that D.C. is a strange and exotic place with a culture all its own, it can be found here.
Acerbic fun for political junkies.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-51750-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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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