A valuable road map that shows us how we got where we are today.
A lucid history of the first decade of the 21st century, which set trends in motion that are with us today.
What to call that time? Washington, D.C.–based historian Peck dismisses “the aughts” as “too Victorian,” and he suggests that the “decade of disruption” is just about right to describe an era in which technology ravaged entire industries. He examines many other trends that seemed to happen overnight but that took years—e.g., the constantly threatened right of gay couples to marry, the rise of the tea party as a directly racist response to Barack Obama, and the still reverberating consequences of the Great Recession, among them the political polarization that reigns supreme today. Peck has a keen eye for the small but telling detail, such as the fact that Wall Street analysts were publicly promoting the dot-com boom but privately keeping their distance, aware that it was a bubble about to burst. (Make that two bubbles: the internet and the telecommunications sector.) The cynicism of Wall Street and Washington are constant threads, with “shareholder value” and giveaways to the already rich being the main ends of the denizens of both. Disruption holds sway throughout Peck’s narrative, but there are plenty of old-fashioned decadence and con games as well, from the fraudulent Trump University to Tiger Woods’ infidelities. By Peck’s account—and he’s a military veteran—the single greatest mistake of the decade was an act of hubris: “following a false trail of evidence and messianic zeal to overthrow a Middle Eastern dictator,” thus leading to the invasion of Iraq. In his nimble yet fact-dense account, the author enumerates many other errors, from gerrymandering and the expansion of the imperial presidency to the ideological sclerosis of the Republican Party and the destruction of the middle class.
A valuable road map that shows us how we got where we are today. (16 pages of color photos)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64313-444-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
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 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
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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