Quality muckraking by journalist Mitchell (CNN, Parade Magazine, etc.), now a special assistant with the FDA. Mitchell's cleareyed scrutiny of presidential peccadilloes and abuses of power begins with George Washington, who refused a salary for his years with the Continental Army but who also submitted a half-million-dollar expense account for the war years. Thomas Jefferson's much-discussed affair with slave Sally Hemings is mentioned, and so is his protection of President-to-be James Madison, secretly afflicted with epilepsy and nursed through at least one attack by Jefferson. The author shows Andrew Jackson's obsession with female honor to have been not simple chivalry but an obsessive judgmental limitation that extended beyond duels to disrupt the Cabinet and the political process. Mitchell has unearthed a remarkable collection of little-known facts, but more important is his balanced view and his ability to present these leaders in their complexity. He also clarifies the relative scale of corruption, distinguishing between minor graft associated with useful underlings and the enormity of such disasters as Harding's giveaway of natural resources in Teapot Dome, or the loss, under JFK, of the TFX contract by Boeing to General Dynamics—with the apparent connivance of LBJ, a man notoriously vulnerable to bribery. The Reagan Administration in particular comes under criticism, from the theft of Jimmy Carter's debate notes to Michael Deaver's influence-peddling to the Wedtech scandal. Mitchell also makes a provocative connection between arms profiteering, the ascension of CIA influence on national policy, and the subversion of constitutional process in the Iran-contra affair. Telling details, crisp writing, good history. (Twenty-four b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Jan. 20, 1993
ISBN: 0-7818-0063-3
Page Count: 420
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
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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