An ambitious, impressively researched history, though the writing tends toward the ploddingly scholarly.
A massively thorough survey of the formation of the U.S. Foreign Service, from Benjamin Franklin’s early efforts to convince European powers to back the colonists’ cause to Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens’ tragic death in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.
Created as an arm of the executive branch, the U.S. Department of Foreign Affairs was conceived in 1781. For one “glorious moment” in 1784, the diplomatic team for the fledgling U.S. in Paris was represented by Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, their missions being to instill confidence abroad for the young nation, negotiate treaties, open markets and protect U.S. seamen overseas, among other duties. With the ratification of the Constitution, the U.S. Department of State was formally created, and it reported only to the president, with Thomas Jefferson serving as the first secretary of state. Despite the ensuing rocky relations between Britain and France, one high point of diplomatic negotiation included the bargaining for the Louisiana Territory with Napoleon, while an early foreign-service “professional,” William Brown Hodgson, with his quick study of Arabic, helped to anchor the growing nation by establishing relations with the Ottoman Empire. Moskin (Mr. Truman's War: The Final Victories of World War II and the Birth of the Postwar World, 1998, etc.) gallops chronologically over the decades to pin some of the milestones in foreign-service evolution, such as the ongoing correction of the “spoils system” (awarding political cronies and big donors with consulates) in favor of service meritocracy. The author looks at the many hotspots around the world where diplomacy has been crucial in resolving debates concerning expansion, slavery and empire, from Mexico to China to Russia to the “diplomacy of oil” in the Middle East.
An ambitious, impressively researched history, though the writing tends toward the ploddingly scholarly.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-03745-9
Page Count: 816
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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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