A systematic, heady dose of American history by a frustrated, even outraged progressive thinker.
A spirited call to remember and act on the original progressive intent of Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms.
The rallying cry of the Greatest Generation—with its back to the Great Depression and its face to the Axis threat in Europe—contained those “four freedoms” delineated by President Roosevelt in his annual message to Congress on Jan. 6, 1941: freedom of speech and expression, freedom to worship God in one’s own way; freedom from want; and freedom from fear. As historian, author and journalist Kaye (Democracy and Justice Studies/Univ. of Wisconsin-Green Bay; Thomas Paine and the Promise of America, 2005, etc.) sets forth in this stirring survey, those four basic ideals have been supplanted and even submerged over the last 30 years by the erosion of democratic impulses through private greed and massive economic inequality. Kaye walks readers through the Roosevelt era to remind us of its greatest achievement: the recovery from an unprecedented Great Depression through a battery of mightily effective government agencies, public works and regulatory acts. The programs aimed to empower laboring people, consumers, Southern blacks, minorities and women, and while much of the New Deal was deemed radical, Roosevelt claimed his programs were part of the “perpetual, peaceful revolution—a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly, adjusting itself to changing conditions without the concentration camp or the quicklime of the ditch.” Indeed, the Four Freedoms unfurled not long before the U.S. was plunged headlong into war, thus becoming the sustaining ideals worth fighting for. Moreover, FDR intimated that “the American experiment was unfinished,” and yet subsequent presidents and administrations did not necessarily fulfill the promise of the freedoms, as Cold War fears and business interests strengthened the country’s conservative and reactionary elements.
A systematic, heady dose of American history by a frustrated, even outraged progressive thinker.Pub Date: April 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9143-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
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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