A terrifically accessible, up-to-date educational tool.
A concise, thematic book of American history that underscores the constant, ongoing tug between the forces of self-interest and those of social responsibility.
Acclaimed scholars Gilmore (History/Yale Univ.; Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights: 1919-1950, 2008, etc.) and Sugrue (History/New York Univ.; Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race, 2010, etc.) team up to present the unfolding of the so-called American century, from the great promise displayed at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in August 1893 to the presidency of Barack Obama. Presented in a tidy, compelling fashion, the themes that reoccur constantly are the side-by-side evolution of a sense of a survival-of-the-fittest approach to American society—e.g., in the accomplishments of the great self-made entrepreneurs such as John Rockefeller—and the growth of a progressive movement committed to the benefits of organized labor, women’s suffrage, and income and racial equality. Moving chronologically, the authors capture the forces that spurred America toward world leadership during this century, through the Wilsonian idealism of self-determination and the sweeping New Deal policies of Franklin Roosevelt, as well as the precipitous, strong-armed military actions in the Spanish-American War, Vietnam War, and later wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The authors provide excellent coverage of social currents that emerged from the great crisis of World War II (“In at Least Modest Comfort: Postwar Prosperity and Its Discontents”) that then galvanized the enormous social change of the 1960s. Keeping the chapters short and broken up into palatable segments, the authors devote one entire chapter to the fractious upheaval that occurred between 1968 and 1974. Moreover, to keep things readable, the authors often interweave stories of regular individuals who experienced or chronicled some historical glimpse in time—e.g., William Frank Fonvielle and his alarming firsthand look at new forms of segregation springing up in the Deep South in 1890.
A terrifically accessible, up-to-date educational tool.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-23952-2
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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