A mainstream liberal's view of US political history from the New Frontier to the Watergate scandal. Blum (History/Yale; The Progressive Presidents, 1980, etc.) offers a fresh, comprehensive study of the era with special emphasis on the political trends and thought that acted on the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon Administrations. Blum contends that the years 1961-74 were ultimately about ``the appropriate role of the government in solving'' serious national problems. As he notes in an all-too-brief epilogue, landmark decisions made with little popular or Congressional support by those Presidents and by narrow margins at the Supreme Court reverberate in today's most bitter controversies, from abortion rights to police powers. Through his ``reexamination of American liberalism,'' Blum shows how confused, short-sighted foreign-policy initiatives in Vietnam, Cuba, Panama, and elsewhere came at a cost to advances in the domestic welfare. Those advances- -the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the War on Poverty, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Johnson's Great Society as exemplified by innovative educational and medical programs—however short-term or incomplete, benefited millions of underprivileged Americans. But Blum also argues that failure is inevitable when ``a national security state with its military priorities'' is allowed to grow alongside of and is ``predatory'' upon the ``liberal state.'' By taking a roughly chronological approach, Blum provides astute analysis of the judicial activism of the Supreme Court, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy's role in civil rights, the personal excesses and quirks of Nixon and Johnson, and the evolving contradictory roles and powers of the presidency. Blum's insightful linking of political and societal forces to events and the Presidents who shaped (and were shaped by) them aids immensely in a clear understanding of a complicated period. (Thirty-two pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 9, 1991
ISBN: 0-393-02969-7
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
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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