A useful reminder of a past era that resonates with contemporary politics.
The story of internecine warfare in the Democratic Party.
In 1980, Jimmy Carter was in trouble. The sitting Democratic president was unpopular. Though the economy had been flagging for most of the past decade, as sitting president, he bore much of the blame even if he did not deserve it. Iranian revolutionaries had taken Americans hostage in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and Carter seemed helpless. On matters both domestic and foreign, Carter was perceived as weak and out of touch. Even as he anticipated a tough election fight against whomever the Republicans nominated (Ronald Reagan, it would turn out), he faced a challenge from the left within his party. Ted Kennedy, the youngest son of the legendary political family, challenged Carter for the Democratic nomination that year. As Yahoo senior political correspondent Ward notes, “it was one of only a handful of times…that an incumbent president running for reelection had been challenged from within his own party.” Though Carter would emerge from that struggle, bruised and battered, he would succumb to Reagan in the general election. This is the story the author tells in this intriguing political history. In a fine dual political biography that becomes a riveting tale of a party seemingly in chaos, the author occasionally overstates his case—the Democrats were hardly “broken” as a party in the 1980s and beyond—and the dual-biography structure sometimes makes it seem as if Carter and Kennedy are somehow inevitably on a political collision course. Still, Ward provides deep insight into American politics in the past five decades. He writes fluidly and demonstrates a firm grasp of how politics work. It is also interesting that he writes in a time when there are increasing whispers that a sitting president might face an internal challenge to his renomination.
A useful reminder of a past era that resonates with contemporary politics.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4555-9138-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
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 Yorker staff 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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