A useful, cogent examination of why, despite some folly and ill judgment, America continues to be the one country the world...
A reasoned argument for the universally appealing power of American ideals over imperial might.
Cobbs Hoffman (Foreign Relations/San Diego State Univ.; Broken Promises, 2011, etc.) makes a systematic case against American imperialism in favor of its assumption of the role of world arbitrator. The notion of empire had been devalued since the Peace of Westphalia brought an end to the Thirty Years’ War in 1643 and established for the first time a notion of sovereign states, equal and free from international control. From this moment also flowed the preference for arbitration over violent dispute. The United States, as a nation of citizens truly able to “begin the world over again,” as Thomas Paine described, enshrined in its very founding the three trends of democratic capitalism already being legitimized the world over yet taken to new heights here: access, in terms of opportunity for all; arbitration, or the use of diplomacy and sanctions over violence; and transparency, as being proven more useful in economic and political dealings than secrecy. Moving chronologically, Cobbs Hoffman reveals how America first had to heal its own internal conflict between federal and state authority inherent in the Constitution, nicely handled by Alexander Hamilton yet challenged and ultimately resolved in a bitter Civil War, so that at last the country could “pioneer the new norms of international relations of which Enlightenment thinkers had long dreamed”—most notably, in the implementation of the doctrines by presidents Monroe, Wilson and Truman.
A useful, cogent examination of why, despite some folly and ill judgment, America continues to be the one country the world looks to when in crisis or need of support.Pub Date: March 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0674055476
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
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
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