A thoughtful analysis that will annoy and please readers on both sides of the aisle.
Rossinow (History/Metropolitan State Univ.; Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America, 2007, etc.) revisits the 1980s and finds things both to admire and disdain in the president, the culture and the rest of us.
In a work that will not completely please Ronald Reagan’s vast choruses of admirers and detractors, the author, who has written frequently about the choreography of history and politics, declares that he offers “a sober evaluation of Reagan and the era of American politics that he dominated.” But as the text unfolds, Rossinow’s disgust with the excesses of the period—the lies, the deceptions, the neglect of the helpless—grows ever more edged. After sketching Reagan’s rise, the author revisits many of the personalities and events whose names continue to evoke strongly partisan reactions 35 years later. Margaret Thatcher, cocaine and crack, “Just Say No,” David Stockman, Jeane Kirkpatrick, the Falklands, the PATCO strike, Ed Meese, the Beirut bombings, Bonfire of the Vanities, Ivan Boesky, Rock Hudson and AIDS, Bernhard Goetz, Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, Oliver North and Iran-Contra, Chernobyl, Michael Dukakis, Willie Horton—these and numerous others appear throughout. Rossinow is hardest on Reagan (and his circle) for the neglect of the poor, the ill (especially AIDS victims) and the nonwhite, but he also gives Reagan credit for his hard stance with the Soviets and for restoring American confidence, though he reminds us that the Strategic Defense Initiative—the “Star Wars” missile protection system—was daffy from the outset. He suggests that Reagan escaped a possible impeachment (Iran-Contra) due to the declining mental acuity that ended in Alzheimer’s, and he devotes some pages to Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush and to the nastiness of campaigns.
A thoughtful analysis that will annoy and please readers on both sides of the aisle.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-0231169882
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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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