A well-argued polemic that charts the unfortunate trajectory of the United States.
In this brief history of the United States, Morrow argues that the American experiment has ended.
The USA was founded by flawed men who created a flawed system; such is the premise of this volume, which delves into the history of the country as an experiment launched by the founders. The author summarizes events that will be familiar to anyone who listened in history class in school, covering the Boston Massacre, the Intolerable Acts, the Boston Tea Party, and so on. Throughout, Morrow emphasizes that individual freedom—including freedom regarding religion—is a core tenet of the nation. The author examines the grievances expressed within the Declaration of Independence and makes some pointed arguments about the modern U.S. government doing some of the very things the founders objected to. He walks readers through the creation of the Constitution, from the Articles of Confederation to the Bill of Rights, emphasizing that there were always flaws in these documents as well as problems the country would have to contend with that the founders didn’t anticipate. The author discusses threats to the experiment, including slavery and the Civil War, the development of the U.S. as a global superpower, race relations, the Red Scare, and the Great Depression. The section of the book titled “The Experiment Concludes” begins with the Cold War; the latter half of the 20th century was, per the author, a time when the dynamics of the country were in tension (liberty vs. safety, progress vs. economic growth). Morrow insightfully analyzes the growth of the religious right, the Tea Party, and the cult of personality around Donald Trump, convincingly arguing that these developments are in direct opposition to the freedom the founders envisioned (“The MAGA movement can be dispassionately defined as a cult”). The author comes to the conclusion that the U.S. is now a country that would seem utterly foreign to its founders, sounding the pessimistic note that the experiment is over. The text is well researched and well argued, if sometimes lacking in nuance.
A well-argued polemic that charts the unfortunate trajectory of the United States.Pub Date: July 14, 2026
ISBN: 9798995917229
Page Count: 350
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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