From LBJ's domestic adviser, a memoir that shows the President ``with the bark off''cagey, crude, demanding, and, finally, Shakespearean in his pitiful descent from power. Here, unlike in Governing America (1981), his take-no- prisoners account of his unhappy tenure as HEW Secretary under Jimmy Carter, Califano (America's Health Care Revolution, 1986) has had more time to reflect and fewer axes to grind, and the result is all to the good. He depicts LBJ not as Robert Caro's monster of ambition or speechwriter Richard Goodwin's clinical paranoid, but as a masterful President who, despite an often recalcitrant Congress and his own deep personal flaws, delivered the astonishing Great Society legislation. Future LBJ biographers will be combing this account for some of the more priceless anecdotes of this hard- driving pol at work: installing a telephone in Califano's office bathroom so that the young aide could always be at his beck and call; calling in the press before a flummoxed new appointee could change his mind about accepting the post; or winning a key vote on civil-rights legislation by identifying a Congressman's secrethis black mistress. The second half of the narrative takes an increasingly more somber tone, with Johnson unsuccessfully using all his energy and intelligence to keep the economy afloat, conclude the Vietnam War, and extend his landmark social-welfare programs. New light is shed on the deterioration of the President's relationship with Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, his folly in nominating crony Abe Fortas as Supreme Court Justice, his contempt for Richard Nixon and Robert Kennedy, and his turning to religion in crises. One of the better White House ``palace guard'' memoirs of latea compassionate, blessedly self-effacing tribute to a President who ``put the thumb of government on the scale for the vulnerable among us.'' (Black & white photographsnot seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-66489-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1991
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
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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