A useful summary of recent events—and one that does Allen proud.
An absorbing survey of America’s second Gilded Age.
Veteran journalist Johnson (The System, 1996, etc.) borrows a page from social historian Frederick Lewis Allen in sketching an account of “what in the future may be considered a distinct era in American history”—namely, the trend- and scandal-ridden 1990s. Four large themes occupy much of this unchallenging, reader-friendly study. On the first, the explosion of technology, Johnson ranges from gee-whiz optimism to should-we-worry pronouncements, echoing Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov’s comment on his loss to an IBM computer called Big Blue, “I'm a human being. When I see something that is well beyond my understanding, I’m afraid.” On the second theme, the growing cult of celebrity and media power, Johnson offers well-honed observations on the now-shopworn O.J. Simpson murder trial and some of its attendant ironies, including a surge in SUV sales following the infamous Bronco chase; he is less successful at capturing the spirit of media tycoons such as David Geffen and Michael Bloomberg, both of whom he profiles. On the third, American culture and society at the dawn of the millennium, Johnson closely follows the ups and downs of the market, fashions, college-exam scores, and other telling indicators of modern life, while on the fourth, the career of William Jefferson Clinton, he does a solid job of portraying a president who survived his terms in office largely because his enemies persistently “misread the American public,” which, it seems, was more concerned with riding the wave of prosperity than punishing its leader for his considerable sins. Johnson’s approach is History Lite, with no discernible ideology, which makes this a strong candidate for use in survey courses.
A useful summary of recent events—and one that does Allen proud.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100445-5
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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