by Edward H. Miller ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 4, 2022
Though sometimes a slog, a welcome contribution to the history of modern right-wing politics at its extremes.
The GOP may be Donald Trump’s party—but at heart, this book argues, it’s really the party of a revanchist John Birch Society.
“We live in the age of Robert Welch—whether or not we know who he is, what he did, or why he matters.” So writes Miller in a sometimes-ponderous but nevertheless meritorious life of Welch, a candy magnate whose conspiracy theorizing foreshadowed today’s QAnon. Welch was an early champion of the isolationist “America First” movement, whose slogan Trump appropriated, and he fomented ideas that ranged from charging that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist agent to asserting that Sputnik was a hoax and the Vietnam War was run by the Kremlin to advance one-world government. As Miller documents, Welch was a brilliant young man who memorized thousands of volumes of poetry, literature, and history. Still, he descended into what historian Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style” of interpreting government. By the end of his life, Welch believed that it wasn’t the communists after all but instead the Illuminati and the Trilateral Commission that controlled the planet. Despite such bizarre views, the John Birch Society was successful in the age of Joseph McCarthy and even more so in the 1970s, when public trust in government plummeted, in part thanks to Richard Nixon, who espoused some of Welch’s doctrines. Although, as Miller documents to sometimes tedious length, the John Birch Society fell apart thanks to infighting and insolvency, its worldview is alive and well in QAnon, the “truther” and “birther” movements, and the mainstream GOP, the last of which likely embraced it out of sheer cynicism. After all, Miller writes, “Welch was an eccentric, a conspiracy theorist who said zany things, but he had sincerity.” Sincerity is scarcely something one would apply to the current run of right-wing politicians, from Trump on down, who seem to throw out conspiracy theories willy-nilly to see what sticks.
Though sometimes a slog, a welcome contribution to the history of modern right-wing politics at its extremes.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-226-44886-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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