A worthy and readable piece, especially for journalism students and those who want to be better, more critical consumers of...
The son of famed expat journalist Alistair Cooke doffs his historical-novelist garb (South of the Border, 1989, etc.) to offer well-placed insights on the press in wartime.
Democracy is more demanding than other political arrangements, newsman Eric Sevareid once noted. It’s also more demanding to investigate events independently instead of accepting press releases and briefings at face value, as the media seemed inclined to do during the first years of the Iraq War. The nation’s founders, notes Cooke, “saw government’s inclination to suppress the rights of citizens not as occasional, or rare, but constant,” especially during wartime. Cooke highlights journalists who resisted government demands to present news as propaganda and often came under fire for doing so. (“You would think by now we could agree that dissent is not disloyal,” he writes.) Pioneering colonial printer Isaiah Thomas, for instance, happily pilloried king and Parliament throughout the years leading up to the Revolution, proclaimed victory as “an event that must affect every patriotic American with joy and pleasing sensibility,” and promptly turned his pen against a Massachusetts legislature eager to tax its new subjects. Similarly, crusading journalist Walter Lippmann ended his long career as a gadfly by enduring the considerable wrath of Lyndon Johnson, who conducted what James Reston called a “vicious vendetta” against him that ended only when Walter Cronkite joined Lippmann in denouncing troop escalations in Vietnam. Cooke makes room for discussion of contrarians on the right, such as William Randolph Hearst and Robert McCormick, whose free-press engagements were sometimes self-serving but sometimes admirable. The author’s more recent heroes, however, are undoubtedly liberal journalists who have stepped up to question the current administration’s conduct of the war in Iraq, among them Philip Gourevitch, Seymour Hersh, George Packer and Dana Priest.
A worthy and readable piece, especially for journalism students and those who want to be better, more critical consumers of the news.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4039-7515-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
