A splendid rendering—filled with triumph, tragedy, and hope—that will please Lepore’s readers immensely and win her many new...
The celebrated New Yorker writer and Bancroft Prize winner tells the American story.
“A nation born in revolution will forever struggle against chaos,” writes Lepore (History/Harvard Univ.; Joe Gould’s Teeth, 2016, etc.). In this mammoth, wonderfully readable history of the United States from Columbus to Trump, the author relies on primary sources to “let the dead speak for themselves,” creating an enthralling, often dramatic narrative of the American political experiment based on Thomas Jefferson’s “truths” of political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. The author recounts major events—the Revolution, Civil War, world wars, Vietnam, 9/11, and the war on terror—while emphasizing the importance of facts and evidence in the national story, as well as the roles of slavery (“America’s Achilles’ heel”) and women, both absent in the founding documents. Lepore offers crisp, vivid portraits of individuals from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine to Liberator writer Maria W. Stewart and preacher David Walker to contemporaries like “rascal” Bill Clinton, sporting a “grin like a 1930s comic-strip scamp.” “To study the past is to unlock the prison of the present,” writes the author, noting recurrent debates about guns, abortion, and race. “Slavery wasn’t an aberration in an industrial economy; slavery was its engine,” she reminds. Throughout, Lepore provides sharp observations (“instead of Marx, America had Thoreau”) and exquisite summaries: In World War I, “machines slaughtered the masses. Europe fell to its knees. The United States rose to its feet.” She discusses the “aching want” of the Depression and the “frantic, desperate, and paranoid” politics of today. Always with style and intelligence, Lepore weaves stories of immigrants and minorities, creates moving scenes (Margaret Fuller’s death in a storm off New York City), and describes the importance of photography and printed newspapers in the lives of a divided people now “cast adrift on the ocean of the Internet.”
A splendid rendering—filled with triumph, tragedy, and hope—that will please Lepore’s readers immensely and win her many new ones.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-63524-9
Page Count: 960
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
Though chilling, this unfocused narrative fails to illuminate the purported relationship between Nelson Rockefeller, missionaries in South America, and the modern genocide of Amazonian Indians. Colby (DuPont: Behind the Nylon Curtain, not reviewed) and investigative journalist Dennett detail Rockefeller's rise to power (both unofficial power through his family's oil interests and official power in government); this is coupled with a description of William Cameron Townsend's creation of Wycliffe Bible Translators, a network of evangelical missionaries working under the auspices of the elusively named Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). The authors describe the links between the SIL's in-depth knowledge of indigenous people and their languages and the creation of a sophisticated communications and intelligence-gathering network serving the business interests of multinational corporations and the anti-communist policies of the US government. Also important is the documenting of Rockefeller's powerful role in the development of US policy toward Latin America and his early vision of a ``peaceful conquest of the world'' through economic aid and political manipulation. But beyond this, it is unclear how Rockefeller fits into the devastation of the Amazon's indigenous people. In seeking to document global changes of epic proportions, Colby and Dennett present themselves with an impossible descriptive task, with virtually no opportunity to either analyze their voluminous historical data or focus on any one of the many interesting issues they raise. Only three-quarters of the way into the book do the authors actually discuss the conquest of the Amazon, and the description of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Amazonian Indians is insubstantial; at one point, the authors simply list a series of decimated Indian groups, providing the dates of SIL ``occupation.'' Only in the case of the deaths of striking Bolivian miners is it clear who is responsible and why. This falls considerably short of its potential as a major study of the tragic destruction of the Amazon and its indigenous people. (24 pages b&w photos, maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-016764-5
Page Count: 704
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
A scathing look at the human costs of war.
A bell-clear, powerful indictment of the debacle of recent Middle Eastern war policy.
Since 9/11, Los Angeles Times Moscow bureau chief Stack has been covering the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon, and her account illustrates the senseless destruction and carnage wrought in the region by the United States and Israel. The author spoke with a diverse range of people involved, including Afghani warlords waiting on American guns in order to fight the Taliban, and probably allowing al-Qaeda fighters to escape into Pakistan for a fee; terrorist victims in Megiddo, Israel; Iraqi refugees from the American invasion; the pampered community of Americans at the Saudi Aramco compound; a Yemeni high-court judge espousing his methods of “theological redemption”; angry young demonstrators in Beirut in the aftermath of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri’s assassination; and Egypt’s pious Muslim Brotherhood, who attempted to proceed with elections in spite of the Mubarak government’s “dirty tricks.” “Somewhere between Afghanistan and Iraq,” writes Stack bitterly, “we lost our way.” What she saw in her travels clearly indicates that America—the idea of America—was held up as a model. But after the bombings, invasions and Abu Ghraib, America has deeply disappointed the people in these devastated regions. Stack’s writing is visceral and intensely personal, as many of the people she knew and interviewed were killed—maybe even because she “took a chance with their lives” by being seen talking with them. “Countries, like people,” she writes movingly, “have collective consciences and memories and souls, and the violence we deliver in the name of our nation is pooled like sickly tar at the bottom of who we are.” Despite the war to bring democracy to the region, Stack observes, very little has changed, except a hardening, an acceptance of the seemingly endless condition of war.
A scathing look at the human costs of war.Pub Date: June 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-52716-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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