When you next put on a seat belt, visit a national seashore, or switch to NPR, think of the Great Society, says Pulitzer Prizewinning historian Unger (New York Univ.). Unger notes that although the latter-day New Deal begun under the Kennedy administration is best known for sweeping programs of benefit to the poor and disenfranchised, ``there was another Great Society aimed at the educated middle class, or intended for its advantage. Though little noted, this `quality of life' movement may in fact be the one that succeeded best.'' Under the presidencies of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, he writes, an assembled intelligentsia was put to the problems of finding ``answers for America'' and to establishing what Johnson called ``a creative federalism between the National Capital and the leaders of local communities.'' The reform agenda that these thinkers—Schlesinger, Harrington, Shriver, and others—proposed was never wholeheartedly adopted, Unger writes, but it did usher in a ``post-scarcity sensibility,'' the idea that within the vast riches of America lay the possibility of equity for all. Interestingly, in Unger's leisurely analysis, the impetus for much of this reform came not from special-interest groups but from within the federal government itself, leading to an official activism that has not since been matched. Unger points to some unlikely heroes in this campaign, among them the since-discredited legislator Wilbur Mills, who helped make Medicare a reality, and Richard Nixon, who took time during Watergate to sponsor a series of far-reaching environmental and social initiatives, although he had less faith than his predecessors in the power of government to right social wrongs. At a time when the last vestiges of Great Society federalism are under siege in Congress, this well-written study commands particular interest. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-46833-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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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