A useful time capsule that explains the social fragmentation, political polarization and tumultuous mood swing of a pivotal...
A Bancroft Prize–winning historian revisits the year the ’60s truly began.
Lighting the National Christmas Tree in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared these “the most hopeful times…since Christ was born in Bethlehem.” Nobody laughed. Near the end of the ensuing year, the nation’s political and social consensus had unraveled to the point that a protest song called “Eve of Destruction” topped the charts. Again, nobody laughed. Patterson (History Emeritus/Brown Univ.; Freedom is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America’s Struggle over Black Family Life from LBJ to Obama, 2010, etc.) traces the cracks in the cultural zeitgeist, when Sinatra gave way to the Rolling Stones, when TV news exploded into color, when The Sound of Music made room for James Bond and Thunderball, when the feel-good Beatles turned pensive, when Dylan went electric. The author’s at his best, though, tracking the year’s political developments. During a period of unprecedented economic prosperity, Congress enacted transformative legislation covering immigration, employment, voting rights, health care and education. At the same time, Selma, Ala., became infamous, and Watts erupted in riots. A baffled Johnson wondered how this was possible. More than anything, the military escalation in Vietnam accounted for the growing unrest. Loath to jeopardize his Great Society programs with an open debate on the war and unwilling to “lose” Vietnam, the president gradually increased the bombing and the troop commitment. The “Credibility Gap” between the president’s words and deeds in Vietnam helped supercharge peace demonstrations that would ultimately overwhelm his presidency. Patterson’s sketch of an agonized Johnson perfectly mirrors the nation’s descent from smug self-assurance to puzzlement, peevishness and, finally, anger.
A useful time capsule that explains the social fragmentation, political polarization and tumultuous mood swing of a pivotal year in American history.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-465-01358-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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