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HAMILTON, ADAMS, JEFFERSON

THE POLITICS OF ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE AMERICAN FOUNDING

A lucid argument, usefully extending the intellectual history of the American Revolution by interrogating three great...

City-slickers versus countryfolk, skeptics versus Bible-thumpers: the red state/blue state divide was there at the very start of the nation.

As Gertrude Himmelfarb groused in her grouchy Roads to Modernity (2004), there were several Enlightenments. Whereas she clearly prefers the English one to the icky French version, Staloff (History/CUNY; The Making of an American Thinking Class, 1997) finds virtues—but also failings—in the several approaches to the Enlightenment endorsed and even represented by three well-covered Founding Fathers. If Immanuel Kant defined the Enlightenment and its forebears in rationalism as “dare to know!,” then Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton expanded it to read “dare to act!” But each took a different tack. Hamilton found a perfect republic in the marketplace, marked by “commercial prosperity, economic growth, and social mobility”; by Staloff’s view, Hamiltonian man evolved into the New Yorker of today, full of moneymaking energy but not necessarily of the patrician graces. Jefferson, that “Romantic visionary,” took his cues from France, at least in part because he conceived such a great hatred of the English crown during the Revolution; the proposed Jay treaty drove him to distraction, as did what he regarded as Adams’s (and Hamilton’s) secret entreaties to the English in the postwar era, hoping to get the pounds rolling back to the ports of New York and New England. (Hamilton retorted by accusing Jefferson of having “a womanish attachment to France and a womanish resentment against Great Britain.”) And Adams’s Enlightenment allowed a meritocracy, but certainly not a democracy: talent and genius were rare, he reckoned, and it was a fool’s job to suppose everyone equal; “No love of equality,” he railed, “ever existed in human nature.” Yet all embraced republicanism, if with different wrinkles, and associated doctrines whose origins were, Staloff notes, urban in origin, the stuff of smart coffeehouses and salons, hinging on access to the printed word and best read with at least some sense of irony and humor, and hopeful that the nation was capable of self-governance.

A lucid argument, usefully extending the intellectual history of the American Revolution by interrogating three great revolutionaries.

Pub Date: July 4, 2005

ISBN: 0-8090-7784-1

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

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  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


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  • National Book Award Finalist

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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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