A useful overview of recent American political history.
A solid academic analysis of the American communist movement that draws on recently declassified Soviet documents.
"Most Americans have never liked communism. Indeed, most have despised it,'' writes Haynes, a historian at the Library of Congress (Dubious Alliances, etc.). Even in the heyday of American communism, during the economic upheavals of the 1930s, most Americans carried such an aversion to Marxist ideals that communist labor organizers took pains to hide their affiliation. In part, he suggests, this dislike owes to the fact that communism has always seemed alien to Anglo-Americans: It came from non-English-speaking Central European immigrants, surfacing at a time when anti-immigrant feeling ran high, and it offered a dogma that ran counter to American ideals of private property and individualism. Still, Haynes writes, while anticommunist feelings may have been firm, most Americans tolerated communists so long as they kept a low profile and presented themselves as "progressives.'' That laissez-faire attitude obtained until the darkest hours of the Cold War, when both mainstream political parties stirred up anticommunist fever. To trump red-baiting Republicans like newcomer Richard Nixon, for example, the Truman administration took great pains to enlist voters of Eastern European ancestry in such organizations as the semiofficial Committee to Stop World Communism. That administration also launched the so-called witch hunts, which Haynes grants a certain legitimacy: "Documents found in Soviet archives,'' he writes, "confirm the [American Communist Party's] direct involvement in Soviet espionage.'' But party politics went only so far: Haynes ascribes the ultimate failure of communism to establish itself as a major force in American politics to organized labor, which was less hostile than merely indifferent to the alien credo.
A useful overview of recent American political history.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 1996
ISBN: 1-56663-090-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
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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