A new study or the 1948 election that has long been called the greatest upset in American political history. Donaldson, (History/Xavier Univ.) provides persuasive analyses of postwar politics, the tactics of contending political parties that marked the breakup of the old FDR New Deal coalition after WWII. To many voters, “Plain Harry” Truman was a drastic letdown after the charismatic and innovative FDR. Truman had little use for New Dealers and was heard to call them “crackpots” and “the lunatic fringe”. He replaced the FDR cabinet with his political cronies and old war buddies. Donaldson finds that only FDR could hold together his unlikely coalition of leftists, liberals, aggressive labor unions, conservative farmers, newly united northern African-Americans, professionals and right-wing southern white supremacists. Truman walked a tightrope between these contending forces. In addition, Donaldson points out that Republicans drew away many old FDR voters who perceived the Yalta conference as a sellout to the Soviet Union. The GOP captured Congress in the 1946 elections as Truman’s popularity declined. All polls predicted a Republican landslide in 1948. Truman found he couldn—t please all factions and decided to abandon the far leftists and the extreme southern white supremacists, both of whom formed new parties led respectively by Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond. Truman’s feisty “whistle stop” train campaign and “give them hell, Harry” speeches endeared him to millions of Americans In the west and south and in large cities. He regained many lukewarm voters with no other place to go except to the newly animated Harry. Donaldson argues that the overconfident Dewey lost the election with his bland, boring campaign speeches as much as Truman won it in a close popular vote. An excellent history of a remarkable event in a tumultuous time in America. (For another look at this election, see Harold I. Gullan, The Upset that Wasn’t, p. 1432.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8131-2075-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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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