An uneven collection of broadsides from the counterculture of complaint. In this gathering of pamphlets, interviews, and commissioned essays, editors Ruggiero and Sahulka, publishers of the Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, tough it up in the face of the conservative age. Left stalwarts like David Dellinger (who makes the curious claim that there are more protests occurring now than in the 1960s) and Noam Chomsky have at the failure of those of like mind to get together and make The Revolution. ``Progressives,'' Joel Rogers writes by way of explanation, ``have forsaken even the ambitions of a mass politics.'' Rogers advances some interesting ideas for ways in which the Left can stake out a new share in American politics. So, too, does economist Juliet Schor, who sees hope for an eventual leftward swing in what she candidly calls ``the slaughter of the Democrats in the 1994 midterm elections.'' The contributors' takes on American politics may be of lesser interest to general readers, however, than are a set of translated documents from the front lines of Mexico's Zapatista Army of National Liberation, who face a crisis of their own. The sense of despair that runs through this volume is suitably postmodern, but much of the rhetoric is solid '60s: Corporations are out to conquer the planet; Somalia was invaded on behalf of Big Oil; Saddam Hussein uses chemical weapons, but we used napalm in Vietnam. ``Now the Cold War is over,'' Dellinger says, ``and the power-elite is desperately seeking replacements such as the war on drugs (except those brought in regularly by the CIA) and a series of invasions in Grenada, Panama, Iraq, and Somalia.'' And so it goes. All in all, comfort food for those who believe that the Trilateral Commission runs the world and that everything bad is fascist, but of little avail to anyone seeking a principled analysis of the nation's woes.
Pub Date: Feb. 12, 1996
ISBN: 1-56584-317-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
