A compilation of mostly captivating thoughts on the American way, as expressed in articles, book reviews, etc., by Yale history professor Blum (Years of Discord, 1991, etc.). The material here focuses on people (FDR, Woodrow Wilson, Henry Wallace, Archibald MacLeish) as well as concepts (``Politics of the Warren Court,'' ``The Red Scare of 1919-1920''). Blum begins with observations on the old (political) and new (social) approaches to history, then goes on to write the kind of history that generally encompasses both, marked by an unwavering perspective that's both clear-minded and humane. The essay ``Burden of American Equality,'' for instance, pungent with the quality of Jacksonian America, contends that slavery bound southern whites together in a way that was totally different from the stratified competition of the North. In ``Virtuous Texts,'' the author approaches the development of Theodore Roosevelt's thought via the Bostonian children's literature of the time—literature that offered an apotheosis of the outdoors-oriented New England world of denial and hard work, with character as the key to success. ``Power and Order'' then looks at what this childhood reading—plus old money, father-worship, a weak mother, and the early death of a beloved wife—made of the man. By comparison, pieces on Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt are rushed and thin, depending too much on the reader's recall of the period, with assertion and conclusion outweighing evidence and development. A tasty historical potpourri, prepared with style.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1993
ISBN: 0-393-03548-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
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
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