A significant, provocative work that joins an ugly past to an uglier present in American democracy’s continued decline.
A searching history of a time, not so long ago, when the social contract went out the window and Hobbesian war beset America.
As Ganz, the creator of the Substack newsletter Unpopular Front, writes, the early 1990s was a time when social Darwinism pitted the state against the poor, gang wars broke out in big cities, and companies stopped making things and starting dealing in the abstractions of finance. The author credits George H.W. Bush with being “competent within small bounds and small groups,” a fundamentally decent fellow whose clubby Republican Party began to slip into the shadows under the influence of the neo-Nazi David Duke and the Christian nationalist Patrick Buchanan. Both men set a tone that would grow ever more insistent and extremist, eventually culminating in the rise of Trump. “Duke’s entire career would be characterized by attempts to simultaneously gain mainstream recognition and respect and be the predominant leader of the fringe, subcultural world of the Klan and neo-Nazism,” writes the author, a notion that speaks to the current political landscape in the U.S. Yet those two didn’t act alone: Ganz also pins the rise of Trumpism to the neo-Confederate injections of white supremacist writer and editor Sam Francis and New Rightists who insisted that their conservatism was in fact radicalism, just the sort of reimagined Leninism that Steve Bannon would go on to proclaim a few decades later. All of these characters, writes the author, “looked for inspiration among the ideological ruins of earlier times: nationalism, populism, racism, antisemitism, and even fascism.” From the proto-QAnon-ism of Ruby Ridge and Waco to the wacky white-shirt populism of Ross Perot, Ganz makes a convincing, well-documented case that everything old is indeed new again.
A significant, provocative work that joins an ugly past to an uglier present in American democracy’s continued decline.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9780374605445
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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