Harper (European Studies/Johns Hopkins; America and the Reconstruction of Italy, 1986) creatively melds biography with cultural and diplomatic history in this triptych of portraits of important architects of US policy toward Europe during the ``American Century.'' America's ``historic ambivalence'' toward Europe, the author argues, is reflected in the lives of his three subjects, each of whom decisively influenced America's European policy during and after WW II. Franklin D. Roosevelt was proud of his Dutch ancestry and his descent from American Revolutionaries and, unlike other members of the American establishment, never identified with Great Britain. Although he came of age during an era of American isolationism, he was also shaped by youthful experiences in Germany and by his tenure as Woodrow Wilson's assistant secretary of the Navy. The result, Harper contends, was Roosevelt's policy of ``partial internationalism,'' which he defines as ``aiming to arrange the retirement of Europe from world politics while avoiding direct U.S. entanglement.'' George Kennan was, in Harper's view, an aesthete whose ``romantic egotist'' sensibilities were shaped by his midwestern upbringing, his Princeton education, and his preWW II work in the US Foreign Service in Germany; he was also a conservative whose ``partial isolationism,'' resulting in the policy of containment of Soviet communism, was intended ``to restore Europe's centrality and autonomy through temporary U.S. engagement.'' Dean Acheson was a lawyer-statesman who sought to establish the US as a permanent presence in Europe. Harper concludes that the differing, clashing philosophies of these and other leaders often produced results at variance with those intended by US policymakers, and asserts that US ambivalence continues, with America supporting European unity but recoiling before its probable consequences. An absorbing study of the linkages between personal and diplomatic perspectives— illuminating as historical background in this period of European integration and diminished American power.
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 1994
ISBN: 0-521-45483-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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
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