by Jonathan Alter ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 4, 2013
The president’s supporters and, really, all political junkies will love this. Republicans, not so much.
A veteran author, journalist and commentator chronicles the campaign that assured President Barack Obama a second term and cemented a consensus among Americans stretching back to the New Deal.
The 2012 election was neither the referendum on the president and the ailing economy as the GOP had hoped, nor simply a choice between the president and his opponent as Obama had wished. Rather, Bloomberg View columnist Alter (The Promise: President Obama, Year One, 2011, etc.) insists, it was a judgment on the Republicans and their mean-spirited billionaire backers, right-wing media cheerleaders, proponents of voter suppression and “clown car” of primary candidates. As he explores the many infirmities and outrages of the president’s opponents and details Obama’s many virtues, it’s clear that, for the author, the “center” of our politics lies decidedly to the left. This obvious bias impairs his analysis throughout, prompting him too often to offer opinion and speculation as fact. For example, he insists the vitriol directed toward the president exceeds anything in our recent history and claims that the president’s contempt for his opponent accounted for his lackluster first debate performance. He goes so far as to wonder if maybe the president threw the debate “because he wanted the game to be a little more challenging?” When he sticks to straight reporting, however, Alter shines. In always fluid, sometimes arresting prose, he tells the inside story of the bartender who surreptitiously taped Romney’s infamous 47 percent remark, offers sharp miniportraits of numerous campaign operatives, and brilliantly deconstructs the “Big Data” component of Obama’s Chicago headquarters, describing their technological innovations and smooth manipulation of social media that set a new standard for future campaigns.
The president’s supporters and, really, all political junkies will love this. Republicans, not so much.Pub Date: June 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4607-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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