Careful and colorful reporting renders this seldom-told part of the Greatest Generation’s story every bit as inspiring as...
Some 60 years after the G.I. Bill’s passage, Pulitzer Prize–winner Humes (Mean Justice, 1999, etc.) takes a look at one of the most spectacularly successful pieces of legislation in US history.
FDR’s ambitious postwar plan for America, an extension of the New Deal, which sought to guarantee a job, housing, health care and education for all, would likely have proved politically impossible even had he lived. Instead, with painful memories of the WWI Bonus Army’s March on Washington still fresh, and after intense lobbying by the American Legion, Congress enacted a far more modest version intended solely to benefit the millions of returning WWII veterans. The G.I. Bill of Rights certainly did that, by offering vets unemployment compensation and job-placement services, low-interest mortgages requiring no down payment and four fully paid years of college or vocational training. The author effectively gets his arms around this vast, complex subject by centering each of his ten chapters on an individual or small group whose particular story illustrates the bill’s remarkable impact on American arts, science, business and politics. Its largesse benefited relatively few minorities and women, Humes demonstrates, though he also includes success stories like those of Monte Posey, a black vet whose G.I. Bill–funded education led to his employment with the EEOC, and Josette Dermody, whose gunnery-school naval service qualified her for a free education, leading to her career as a schoolteacher. The author is at his best explaining the bill’s unanticipated, transformative effect on American society. It fostered the rise of suburbia, the explosive growth of the university system and the huge expansion of the middle class, all of which reshaped the lives of vets and their boomer children. No run-of-the-mill, pork-barrel legislation has ever had that kind of impact.
Careful and colorful reporting renders this seldom-told part of the Greatest Generation’s story every bit as inspiring as those recounting its survival of the Depression and triumph in war.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-100710-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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