A fresh look at an influential political activist.
The story of a man committed to transforming the landscape of the new world.
Besides being a gadfly, political theorist, and enormously popular pamphleteer, Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was an architect, determined to design an iron bridge, economically crucial, over the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania. Gray (History/Florida State Univ.; New World Babel: Languages and Nations in Early America, 2014, etc.) sets Paine’s engineering project against a backdrop of political turmoil as the Colonies struggled for independence and responded to the French Revolution. In 1775, the prospect of breaking ties with Great Britain generated fierce controversy. “To separate from the United Kingdom,” many colonists thought, “was to challenge the political wisdom of centuries,” which held that a “hereditary monarchy [was] the only way to political stability.” Paine’s Common Sense, published in 1776, contested that view, and within a year, up to 150,000 copies were circulated, with huge impact. Over the next six years, he followed with a series of 13 essays called The American Crisis, exhorting Americans “that theirs was the just cause” and bolstering the morale of beleaguered troops. Paine never grew wealthy from his writing, always returning profits to his publishers to ensure continued printings. As much as he inspired his countrymen, he incited detractors, and by the 1780s, he sought to break with his radical past. “The quiet field of science has more amusement to my mind than politics,” he declared. But although he poured his energies into designing an iron bridge, he could not fully break from politics: Rights of Man appeared in 1791, with a printing of between 100,000 and 200,000 in three years. The Age of Reason was published in 1794; “among the fiercest attacks on organized Christianity ever written,” it earned him new enemies. Although the author repeatedly shifts the focus to Paine’s engineering project, he inevitably returns to the more compelling facts of Paine’s political career.
A fresh look at an influential political activist.Pub Date: April 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-24178-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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