More Jon Stewart’s America than Alistair Cooke’s, but with a fierce and often funny point. Just the thing for the midterm...
“Not all the treasures of the world, so far as I believe, could have induced me to support an offensive war, for I think it murder.”
Thus spoke Thomas Paine, a Founding Uncle if not a Founding Father, whose words are scarcely ever evoked these days. By The Al Franken Show staffer Norton’s judicious account, that’s because Paine is just too darned revolutionary; certainly nothing he said gives aid and comfort to the neocons who have taken the name of the founders in vain in order to justify their imperialist adventures around the globe. Thus, when Dick Cheney wanted to plead for legitimacy in invading Iraq, he summoned up the cozy image of spreading democracy; when he wanted to legitimate the constitution there, he likened the process to the long one of making our own, concluding, “So this is a tough, difficult thing we’re trying to do.” Maybe so, says Norton, but the analogy is wholly false: it just sounds good to quote or mention the founders “when you’re defending a disastrous war,” just as it’s an expedient thing to liken, say, contras and mujahedeen to our own revolutionaries. (Never the insurgents, though: they’re Saddamists and terrorists, not patriots.) Norton is wry and sometimes a tad smartass, but his points are well taken. As John Dean remarked, and as Norton documents in case after case, “the Bush administration has made the Nixon administration look as clean and open as a Quaker picnic.” It’s thus a great irony, Norton argues, that the Bushies so intently strip away civil liberties even as they profess to be legitimate heirs to the likes of Adams, Washington and Jefferson. In the matter of nepotism alone, Norton deftly shows, they don’t even approach operating in the same moral universe.
More Jon Stewart’s America than Alistair Cooke’s, but with a fierce and often funny point. Just the thing for the midterm elections.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-58542-486-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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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