Wide-ranging observations on the ways we write and interpret history, and why it matters, from a Pulitzer Prizewinning editorialist. In these collected pieces, Washington Post Writers Group veteran and journalism professor Yoder (Washington and Lee Univ.) argues that historical consciousness ``is in actuality the only reliable kind of consciousness we have.'' His application of this theory to diverse phenomena is consistently edifying, though as befits a newspaper columnist he tackles subjects on which there is little unanimity. Yoder is sharpest on the Constitution and on presidential destiny, assessment, and reputation. He offers firm opinions on Yalta, and on Hiroshima in light of the 1995 Enola Gay exhibit controversy at the Smithsonian, embracing a traditional view, that the bomb was used to save lives and hasten the end of the war. In the book's last section Yoder extends his focus beyond the subject categories of presidential, constitutional, and nationalist issues to place contemporary novels like E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime and films such as Oliver Stone's JFK and Spike Lee's Malcolm X under scrutiny. The problem with ``docudrama,'' as he calls such works (their artistic value notwithstanding), is that, simply put, its fabrication of the past provides readers and moviegoers with a version of that they are increasingly likely to mistake as ``objective'' history. Most telling is the author's dead-on conclusion that today's historians reflect a deepening cynicism born of the deceptions of the Vietnam era, which points to a larger truth: that ``it should always be recalled that the motives and moods of historians are as essential to the understanding of the history they write as the motives and moods they attribute to the actors they write about.'' As Yoder's subtitle suggests, history is time's rich endowment to the present; in failing to put it to best advantage, we suffer.
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-87805-985-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
