A thoroughly researched book that will appeal mostly to a scholarly rather than general audience.
A comprehensive but unfortunately arid biography of John Jacob Raskob (1879–1950), whom Farber (History/Temple Univ.; The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism: A Short History, 2010, etc.) depicts as a progenitor of modern capitalism.
Solidly Catholic and small-town conservative, Raskob was as close to a Horatio Alger character as the Jazz Age might allow. He came to head first the DuPont chemical concern and then, in an early exercise in cross-fertilization (or at least cross-corporatization), General Motors. As Farber writes, he was a pioneer of the hostile takeover, the credit market and the application of big money to the political process. Moreover, he was a kind of Napoleon Hill/Dale Carnegie popularizer of business and money who urged ordinary Americans to invest in the stock market and thereby grow rich—advice that, fortunately, most Americans ignored, given that the crash and the Great Depression were just around the corner. That loss of credibility and the decline of the supermoneyed class in the age of the New Deal—and here Farber’s discussion makes the book timely—sent Raskob’s reputation into eclipse in his own time (though Sonora, Texas, is nowhere as bad as Farber makes it out to be). He has since been largely forgotten. Granted that Raskob did not have the worldly appetites or scandal-attracting abilities of fellow Catholic conservative Joseph Kennedy, this life seems a touch dutiful, carrying its subject’s stolid, businesslike manner into its pages. Still, no other book covers the same ground—a curious lacuna, given Raskob’s undeniable importance in economic history.
A thoroughly researched book that will appeal mostly to a scholarly rather than general audience.Pub Date: May 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-19-973457-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Grounding his story in documentary and fragmentary archaeological evidence, British archaeologist Hume (Martin's Hundred, 1982) tantalizingly reconstructs the history of the earliest English settlements in America. The British drive for colonies grew out of England's 16th- century rivalry with Spain; hence the earliest English settlements in America were planted in the midst of the ``Terra Florida'' that explorers had claimed for the Spanish crown. After some abortive attempts to create an English foothold in the New World, Sir Walter Raleigh sent more than 100 English colonists under gentleman-artist John White to lay claim to the land the Elizabethans called ``Virginia.'' They landed in Roanoke, in what is now North Carolina, in July 1587. After establishing a fort and colony, White and some members of the group returned to England. When several more English ships arrived in Roanoke in 1589, the colony had vanished with few, cryptic traces. Hume painstakingly reviews the sparse evidence, both from contemporary journals and from modern forays over the site, of the Lost Colony: Almost surely, the settlers were massacred by Indians, although little evidence exists today either of their presence at Roanoke or of their fate. Similarly, Hume tracks the more successful but often tragic history of the Jamestown settlement from its birth in 1607, using artifacts and journals of the period to trace the colony's growth from its unpromising beginning as a small disease-ridden group of adventurers into a prosperous community. Hume focuses particularly on the relationship between the settlers and the Indians, which went from mutual idealization to demonization within a few years. This culminated in the 1622 slaughter by the Indian chief Opechancanough of English settlers in the area around Jamestown and an English backlash against the natives that spelled the ultimate doom of their culture. Hume breaks little novel historical ground, although he eloquently recounts the archaeological record and brings alive the lost settlements of the early American past with wit and style. (164 illustrations) (Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 1994
ISBN: 0-394-56446-4
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
The reclamation of an 18th-century New Hampshire farmstead over the past 25 years provides an enchanting ``natural sequel'' to Eighty Acres, the author's popular 1990 memoir of growing up on a Michigan farm. Jager, a former Yale philosophy professor, and his wife bought the Cape Codstyle farmhouse and 100 acres near Washington, N.H., in 1966. Though they did not move in full-time until the late 1970s, renovation began almost immediately, as did Jager's research into the place and the surrounding community. They christened the spread ``Lovellwood,'' after the mountain that looms over the property. The house had been abandoned for years, and the woods were beginning to reclaim pastures and meadows, while some sections simply lay fallow. Jager learned that Ebenezer Wood, a Revolutionary War Minuteman, was the ``original settler'' on the place in 1780, or '81. When he began work on the interior, he discovered Wood's original framing—``built to last forever''—of pine, spruce, and hemlock beams, held together by oak treenails, or trunnels, as they were called. He exposed those beams, removing layers of wallpaper and cow-hair- and horsehair-bound plaster. Jager also discovered (while mowing the lawn) the original hearthstones Wood had chiseled from the local granite. They had been ``ditched'' by the Powers family, who'd bought the place in 1857, when they remodeled at the turn of the century. While the refurbishing of the house is the central topic, Jager also offers a look at contemporary country living and rural New England politics. He strings together several lovely natural history pieces, such as his eloquent proclamation on his love for the woods; his fond, reasoned farewell to deer hunting; and his cornucopian description of the forest's encroachment on a lush meadow he's trying to save. A joy: like getting a letter from a modern-day Thoreau, one who takes sensual pleasure in writing, and has his feet planted firmly on the soil.
Pub Date: Oct. 18, 1994
ISBN: 0-8070-7062-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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