A richly detailed, thought-provoking celebration of American independence.
Snapshots of American society at 50-year intervals, beginning with the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
“Each jubilee has found the United States at an inflection point: political, economical, or cultural,” write McKean, a former U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg, and Bennett, a former historian at the U.S. Department of State. And so they assess the state of the nation at each of these historical moments, with particular focus on the Declaration’s premise that “all men are created equal.” At the time those five words were written, few of the founders thought they applied to women, African Americans, or Indigenous people—even though Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John to ask him to “remember the ladies.” The new nation didn’t hurry to extend those rights, although each anniversary marked some progress towards fuller equality—notably after the Civil War, with emancipation, and after the successes of the Civil Rights and women’s movements of the 1960s. The celebrations of the signing of the Declaration frequently featured elaborate international expositions highlighting American industry, science, and the arts. Other notable events, such as the deaths of Thomas Jefferson and Adams, both on July, 4, 1826, or George Armstrong Custer’s last stand, in 1876, are also chronicled by the authors. The book offers a wealth of anecdotes: Calvin Coolidge stayed home on July 4, 1926, because it was a Sunday; Brazil’s Emperor Dom Pedro II attended the 1876 exhibition; and a bicentennial wagon train crossed the country in 1976. The final chapter examines the state of the nation in 2026, a time when many Americans feel that democracy is imperiled. “While the headwinds to the American experiment appear overwhelming at times, historical precedent offers some reassurance,” the authors write. “Americans have weathered challenges to democracy before.”
A richly detailed, thought-provoking celebration of American independence.Pub Date: May 12, 2026
ISBN: 9781541704169
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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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