A frank, well-written look at the dangers we face. We ignore them at our peril.
Following her impressive one-volume history of the United States, These Truths (2018), the acclaimed historian delivers a sharp, short history of nationalism, which she describes as “a contrivance, an artifice, a fiction.”
As New Yorker staff writer Lepore (American History/Harvard Univ.) notes, the term wasn’t even used until the 19th century. In 1830s America, it was called sectionalism, and its adherents included those who favored slavery and native tribes who didn’t recognize the government. By the 1880s, nationalism was fed by Jim Crow laws, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Dawes Act, and the Supreme Court ruling that Native Americans had no birthright to citizenship. The author clearly shows that, while patriotism is characterized by love of your home and people, nationalism features hatred of other countries and immigrants as well as those who are different at home. “Immigration policy is a topic for political debate; reasonable people disagree,” writes Lepore. “But hating immigrants, as if they were lesser humans, is a form of nationalism that has nothing to do with patriotism and much to do with racism.” Furthermore, she writes, “confusing nationalism and patriotism is not always innocent.” The author also takes her fellow historians to task for missing the resurgence of nationalism following World War II. Though there was a comparatively brief lull in the 1930s, with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the nation fell apart. Churches were bombed, civil rights leaders were harassed and even killed, and the Ku Klux Klan reappeared. Hopes rose with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Immigration Act, and the Voting Rights Act, and in the 1980s, nationalism in the U.S. was all but dead. However, it continued to thrive in Bosnia and Rwanda and has carried over to Russia, Turkey, Poland, Hungary, and the Philippines. Lepore writes that while global trade, immigration reform, and the internet were supposed to end divisions, nationalism has surged; now we have politics of identity rather than nationality.
A frank, well-written look at the dangers we face. We ignore them at our peril.Pub Date: May 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63149-641-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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 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
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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