Easterbrook’s assurances, however well-based, will ring hollow for many, but it’s an argument worth considering.
Cheer up, world: we’re killing each other less, except in our cars, and living in a boom. Thus this contrarian pep talk by longtime Atlantic contributor Easterbrook (The Game’s Not Over: In Defense of Football, 2015, etc.).
Optimism is out of style, but by the author’s account, it shouldn’t be. When Donald Trump came into office, the unemployment rate was low enough that the number “would have caused economists of the 1970s to fall to their knees and kiss the ground.” Just so, crime is down almost everywhere, inflation is low, food cheap, fuel abundant despite dire warnings of peak resources. Even so, writes Easterbrook, Trump rose on a wave of warnings that America was going to hell in a handbasket, and he had a willing audience that accepted his dire admonitions without question. Why? Well, argues the author usefully, nations as well as people feel their age, and an aging society is naturally going to subscribe to the “declinist” view that things now are worse than when they were in its youth. One has only to go to an American city to see that things are vibrant, blessedly quiet compared to the clamor of a city in the developing nations, and blessedly pollution-free compared to other parts of the world. In his somewhat scattershot argument enumerating all the good things that are going on, though, Easterbrook sometimes inadvertently offers support for the gloomy view. For instance, while it may not be true that American jobs are being shipped off to China, it is true that in China, the same jobs no longer exist for humans because robots are doing them. That gloomy view is unhealthy, he suggests, especially in its Trumpian manifestations of white victimhood, which has little basis in reality but still channels those declinist feelings into widespread aggrievement.
Easterbrook’s assurances, however well-based, will ring hollow for many, but it’s an argument worth considering.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61039-741-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
HISTORY | BUSINESS | WORLD | ECONOMICS | GENERAL BUSINESS | GENERAL HISTORY
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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