For those without grounding in the Declaration’s history and meaning, a useful overview.
A long-range view of the arguments ever since July 4, 1776, about the Declaration of Independence.
Bobb and Williams, teachers and members of the Bill of Rights Institute, open their account with the definitively American critic of American society, Frederick Douglass, and a speech he gave in 1852 joining the Declaration of Independence to the abolitionist cause. Douglass had to face “the gulf between the Declaration’s principles and Americans’ practice of them,” including the maintenance of slavery in a dozen states and territories. The argument carried over into the settlement of the trans-Mississippi West, with Southerners urging the extension of slavery as a “positive good” and Northerners trying to block an expanded slaveholding polity. Along the way, Bobb and Williams look into the contending views of democracy (and numerous other varieties as well) while noting commonalities, including the commitment to government by the people and with the consent of the governed. Much of Bobb and Williams’ text won’t come as news to anyone who’s been through a high school government class, and much reads like a civics survey textbook: “The Declaration of Independence was…instrumental in framing the Constitution and inspiring enslaved people to seek their natural rights in a free society. …During the Cold War, the democratic United States squared off against the totalitarian Soviet Union in an arms race and ideological battle.” What’s more interesting is the authors’ use of statistics to discuss key points of today: The fact that nearly two-thirds of Americans “say that belief in the Declaration’s principles is more important to ‘being American’ than is birthright,” while “91 percent of Republicans and 95 percent of Democrats agree with the statement, ‘Throughout our history, Americans have made incredible achievements and ugly errors,’” though each side believes that the other has a sharply different view.
For those without grounding in the Declaration’s history and meaning, a useful overview.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9798895151709
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Diversion Books
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
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 Yorkerstaff 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
A deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present.
The noted historian and New Yorker staffer looks into a future ruled by machines.
Thirty-odd years ago, writes Lepore, liberal democracies of old were being transformed into both authoritarian or autocratic regimes and by “automatocracy, rule by automation, government by machine-driven computation, prediction, and persuasion.” In this pointed rejoinder to Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which foresaw a world in which humans were essentially superfluous, Lepore charts a long history that extends deep into the “machine age,” beginning in the 17th century, which saw “the artificial as existing not only outside the natural but above it, an improvement upon it.” In this conception, humans were fallible, while machines faithfully and unfailingly obeyed the rules set for them. A logical progression followed in the 1920s with the rise of the Technocracy movement, a variety of fascism widely accepted in the U.S. that held that far from being free and equal, humans should be governed by scientists and engineers who alone “have the intelligence and education to understand the industrial operations that lie at the heart of twentieth-century life.” It’s a short hop from there to the present, with tech billionaires pushing AI and, in the case of the influential “self-described ‘neo-monarchist’” Curtis Yarvin, a dictatorship aided by it. In all this, Lepore writes, it is not just the human animal that suffers but all animals and all habitats, which can only worsen with the incessant demands for energy, rare earths, and water that AI requires. And what “humans crave, in that artificial world, is nature,” a nature that is increasingly silenced. This undemocratic world, benefiting only the wealthy at the expense of all else, is a prison of screens and keyboards from which, she writes memorably, “What is required is to imagine an escape, and then to conduct it.”
A deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9781324098423
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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