A mostly crisp, occasionally choppy history of a moment shaped by celebrity CEOs and disciplined politicos.
Four decades on, layoffs, deregulation, and activism have durable consequences.
Trying to understand the 2020s? Look closely at the variety of American experience amid the 1980s economic boom. So argues journalist-professor Kaufman in this brisk portrait of executives, investors, and political crusaders whose influence remains strong. Two of his subjects leveraged President Reagan’s free-market policies to remake the workplace and the media. GE’s Jack Welch slashed jobs, “emphasized profits over everything,” and instilled a culture of “conflict and fear.” His tenure has been exhaustively chronicled, but Kaufman’s scrutiny of its malign impact on one GE-dependent community adds memorable details. As a fawning press made Welch a “rock star CEO,” Federal Communications Commission Chairman Mark Fowler “methodically dismantled” government restrictions on the airwaves, boosting Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives. Meanwhile, activists of very different kinds pursued long-term goals. The Federalist Society pushed the judicial system ever further to the right. Evan Wolfson’s marriage-equality campaign bolstered LGBTQ+ rights. Kaufman’s book is a useful guide to the ’80s impact on today, though not a notably novel one. Readers already familiar with the foregrounded people and trends will notice that he doesn’t find a plethora of original angles. He includes profiles of somewhat lesser-known figures, such as Karen Nussbaum, whose advocacy improved conditions for working women, and John Rogers, a Black banker and Republican-turned-Barack Obama backer. These are solid, but even a quick glance at the dispiriting headlines of the Trump era undercuts Kaufman’s contention that they “led us to today.” He covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and upheaval in Beijing. His detailed accounts of encounters with Czech police and interviewing Chinese workers are interesting—and an odd fit in a book on domestic life.
A mostly crisp, occasionally choppy history of a moment shaped by celebrity CEOs and disciplined politicos.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9780593300206
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2026
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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