An insightful, if occasionally overwhelming, glimpse into the Reagan administration.
A veteran researcher of the Reagan administration offers an in-depth look at the conservative president’s foreign policy.
“This is not your typical Ronald Reagan book,” author Saltoun-Ebin declares in his opening lines. While the author shares some of the flattering interpretations of the president’s administration found in the myriad of Reagan biographies, such as the role of his personal charm in wooing voters out of the 1970s malaise, Saltoun-Ebin focuses on bringing readers into the Oval Office, the Situation Room, and his Cabinet Room by offering transcripts of declassified conversations between Reagan and his closest confidants during his first term. Topics on well-known aspects of his foreign policy are certainly present, such as Reagan’s staunch opposition to the Soviet Union or his policies toward the Middle East, but the conversations also provide readers glimpses into lesser-known areas, including his approach to allies, if occasional economic rivals, in the Caribbean, Japan, and South Korea. Based largely on declassified materials from the National Security Council and National Security Planning Group, the transcripts provide an intimate look inside Reagan’s administration. In one conversation, for instance, the president describes Lebanon as “the strangest place in the world” because he couldn’t reconcile the nation’s rising terrorist threats with its cosmopolitan hotels, television shows, and sophisticated restaurants. With a law degree from the University of Wisconsin and a former researcher for Reagan biographer Richard Reeves, Saltoun-Ebin is intimately familiar with the archival material hosted at the Reagan Presidential Library. Not only has he written multiple volumes on the former president himself, he also led the way in digitizing his archival materials at TheReaganFiles.com. This is a carefully curated and abridged version of select documents, accompanied by the learned commentary and historical analysis of a leading Reagan researcher. This edition could have used some tighter editorial trimming; many of the conversations consume multiple pages. Nevertheless, the book’s emphasis on engaging both scholars and lay readers is effectively supported by a glossary and ample historical contextualization.
An insightful, if occasionally overwhelming, glimpse into the Reagan administration.Pub Date: June 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798314921876
Page Count: 520
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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