Unfounded, partial, and chauvinistic, without an ounce of cultural-relativist baggage or Cartesian logic. Which is to say:...
Here you thought the bad guys were hanging out in Pyongyang and Peshawar, when it turns out they’re all in Paris.
In this blockheaded contribution to international understanding, National Review politics reporter Miller and Harvard lecturer Molesky paint a malign portrait of the evil, cheese-eating, constantly surrendering, cryptofascist, sniveling French, who have been the villains on the world stage vis-à-vis les Americains ever since they tried to do in George Washington in one of the backwoods campaigns of the Seven Years War. Then they tried to mess with Thomas Jefferson, even though he had bought all that nice wine and furniture from them. Then they shot at Americans who were invading their turf in Operation Torch, and they just got in the way at Operation Overlord. Then they questioned the wisdom of the American invasion of Iraq, hinting—the swine—that maybe unilateral military action wasn’t the best approach to le problème de Saddam. By Miller and Molesky’s account, the more recent effronteries speak to the “French reluctance to accept a new role in a democratic world order led by the United States,” apparently because they haven’t heard that someone died and made us Dieu. The sins multiply, never mind the historical complexities (and, at turns, never mind the facts, period): when Clemenceau remarked, “God gave us his Ten Commandments, and we broke them. Wilson gave us his Fourteen Points—we shall see,” he wasn’t voicing world-weariness about human nature, but rank anti-Americanism. The Khmer Rouge wouldn’t have killed all those people if Pol Pot hadn’t hung around Paris smoking cigarettes and reading Marxist theory in French translation. Americans would still read books, but probably not Marxist ones, if it weren’t for those damned deconstructionists. And so on, to the perverse conclusion that now that Baghdad is ours, the world is a safer place, even with all those French-speaking Muslims at large in the world.
Unfounded, partial, and chauvinistic, without an ounce of cultural-relativist baggage or Cartesian logic. Which is to say: très drôle if you’re in the right mood, and très stupide if you’re not.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-51219-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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