A well-informed, often surprising, history of public veneration.
An art historian digs into a contentious subject.
Thompson, a professor of art crime at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, offers a probing examination of the meaning of public monuments, long a vexed issue for Americans from the time that colonists beheaded a statue of King George III. Throughout the nation’s history, the author argues persuasively, powerful White Americans have erected monuments to underscore their authority and support their own interests. “Eighty-five percent of the more than four hundred Confederate monuments erected from 1886 to 1912 were in public spaces other than cemeteries,” writes Thompson. Not all of them featured war heroes. “By far the most common choice for Civil War monuments,” Thompson reveals, was “an anonymous, low-ranking soldier in parade rest,” conveying a message that obedience was crucial for Whites to prevail. Besides considering the overt messages of some prominent monuments, Thompson investigates the historical context and the artists’ beliefs, revealing some discomfiting facts. For example, a bronze statue entitled Freedom, located in the U.S. Capitol, was made by a slave owner and cast by one of his slaves. Stone Mountain, a vast monument in Georgia, was the product of the angry, paranoid sculptor Gutzon Borglum, for whom it was a moneymaking scam. A statue of Columbus featuring a “straight nose and strong jaw, was a visual argument for the whiteness—and therefore, the Americanness—of the artist’s fellow Italian Americans.” Thompson also discusses the recent protests and the fates of monuments that have been toppled or removed. Since those protests began, bills proposed in 18 states “would increase the criminal penalties for damaging a monument.” Furthermore, most monuments have been either moved or placed in storage to be erected in the future. “Shuffling statues around our cities is like moving an abusive priest to another parish,” Thompson asserts. Besides removing monuments, she suggests, new ones must be added to reflect the values—and the history—that Americans want to honor.
A well-informed, often surprising, history of public veneration.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-393-86767-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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