A frequently insightful look at the makeup of two men who helped remake the country.
A dual biography highlighting the remarkable similarities and the crucial differences between “the two pre-eminent self-made men in American history.”
The interest in linking Lincoln and Douglass has never been greater—see, for example, Paul and Stephen Kendrick’s Douglass and Lincoln (2008) and James Oakes’s The Radical and the Republican (2007)—and surely the intertwined careers of both men support continuing efforts to understand their combined, enduring impact. In five double-barreled chapters focusing on comparable stages in each man’s life, Stauffer (History of American Civilization and English/Harvard Univ.; The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race, 2002, etc.) explains how Douglass the slave and Lincoln the frontiersman emerged from a culture of poverty, ignorance and violence to international renown. Both were physically imposing; both abstained from tobacco and alcohol at a time when few men did. Both were poetry lovers—they had Robert Burns in common—and both were unsuitably married, Douglass to an illiterate, Lincoln to a termagant. A naturally talented orator, Douglass worked to perfect his writing. Always a good, later a great writer (and a superb editor), Lincoln slowly emerged as an effective public speaker. Addressing public issues, Douglass decided quickly and frequently changed strategies. Lincoln always made up his mind slowly, but then rarely reversed course. Douglass, the radical, never befriended an enemy until after converting that man to his cause. Lincoln, the conciliator, believed that “if you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.” Notwithstanding calculated, public statements by Lincoln and Douglass, Stauffer goes too far in claiming “an interracial friendship.” The author is also oddly willing to speculate broadly on Lincoln’s premarital sexual history, and unwilling to reciprocate when it comes to Douglass’s extramarital relations. Despite these lapses, Stauffer’s dexterous interweaving of biographical detail makes for enjoyable reading and serves as a useful introduction to understanding the dynamic between two 19th-century giants.
A frequently insightful look at the makeup of two men who helped remake the country.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-446-58009-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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