Readers must cling to the hope that things are not as bad as the authors claim.
An angry attack on Washington and the wealthy, asserting that their alliance has distorted the economy, shrunk the middle class and enriched the already rich.
Competing polemics rely on predictions of a dire future, but veteran investigative reporters Barlett and Steele point out that they delivered identical warnings in America: What Went Wrong (1992)—all of which came true. They maintain that the deficit is less the result of government programs than plummeting tax revenue from the rich, who paid 51.2 percent of their income in 1955 versus 16.6 percent today. Congress once assumed that salaried workers shouldn’t pay more than the rich, who lived on dividends. They reversed this in 2003, capping the dividend rate at 15 percent. More than half of large American corporations pay no tax. Since the 1970s, advocates of deregulation and free trade persistently proclaim that it increases jobs and reduces the trade deficit, apparently unaware that the exact opposite almost always happens. The authors’ solutions include: Revise the tax code so corporations and the rich pay more than the middle class instead of less, discard the clueless ideology of free trade (no other nation believes it), re-regulate disastrously unregulated areas, and enforce current laws equally instead of giving the influential a free pass. The authors describe genuine problems, but their solutions would produce outrage among congressional Republicans (obscenities such as “tax increase,” “government regulation,” “protectionism” and “class warfare” would fill the air) and no enthusiasm from Democrats. Reforms since the 2008 crash have been easily defeated or watered down.
Readers must cling to the hope that things are not as bad as the authors claim.Pub Date: July 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-58648-969-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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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