by Jeffrey H. Birnbaum ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 6, 1996
Serving the president of the United States may seem like a dream job. But as senior Time correspondent Birnbaum persuasively shows in these portraits of six anguished aides and their short careers in the Clinton White House, it's really a nightmare. Disparate in many ways, these Clinton supporters—Howard Paster (at 48, by far the oldest), Jeff Eller, Paul Begala, Dee Dee Myers, Gene Sperling, and Bruce Reed—had one thing in common: They all arrived in Washington full of conviction that government mattered and that their work would make a difference. Within weeks after Clinton's inauguration, however, an array of mini-scandals and artificial crises conceived and driven by opposition politicians and the media had paralyzed the White House. Paster, a lobbyist responsible for building a working relationship between the White House and Capitol Hill, found that he had an impossible task; the two houses of Congress rarely spoke with a unified voice on anything. Blamed by congressmen for White House gaffes, and by the president's staff for failing to develop a harmonious relationship with Congress, worn down by the relentless stress and the endless hours away from his family, Paster quit after little more than a year. Media affairs director Eller, responsible for a key Clinton administration health care initiative, found himself bogged down in ``Travelgate.'' Despite the administration's rhetoric about diversity, press secretary Myers found that her gender shut her out of the ``white boys' club,'' as she termed it. Stymied by an unruly Republican-controlled Congress, policy advisers Sperling and Reed found it impossible to successfully promote any programs. Even political illusionist Begala was frustrated by scandals and Clinton's lingering image problems, overwhelmed by the workload, and ultimately blamed for the Democratic electoral disaster that resulted in the loss of both houses of Congress. Birnbaum deftly sketches the challenges of being a presidential aide and limns the disturbing boundaries of modern presidential power. (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 6, 1996
ISBN: 0-8129-2325-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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 Yorker staff 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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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