by Jules Witcover ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2005
Witcover is not often deeply reflective—not until the final chapter—and some passages have a cut-and-paste character, but...
A veteran political journalist narrates his journey from typewriter to Internet, from JFK to GWB.
The prolific Witcover (Party of the People: A History of the Democrats, 2003, etc.) calculates that he and his co-columnist, Jack Germond, wrote 6,912 pieces in their 24-year collaboration—in addition to thousands of daily news articles and feature stories. And many books. Most of these, says Witcover, were produced under the most strenuous and stressful of conditions: hard and imminent deadlines, bad food, disingenuous sources. And booze. Witcover recalls waking up at times with a buzzing head and a dim memory. Yet he and his contemporaries—mostly male—still pounded out stories on portable typewriters in the backs of buses and trains. No sissy cell phones and Blackberries in those days! The author begins with a snapshot of his childhood (no other college graduates in his family) and quickly takes us through his years in the Navy (he enlisted just as World War II was ending), through Columbia University, through his first real job, at a Rhode Island paper—all in the first 20 pages. Then he settles in to narrate a fairly conventional chronicle of his years covering some of the most significant events of the last century. He interviewed Otto Frank and Martin Luther King Jr. He covered JFK in West Virginia. He followed Reagan, Romney and Rockefeller. He developed an odd amity with George Wallace. He was in the room when Robert Kennedy was shot. He covered the rise and fall and rise of Nixon, the weird careers of Spiro Agnew and Lester Maddox. He wrote about the self-destructions of Muskie, Eagleton, Hart and Perot. He both mistrusted and admired Clinton and thinks the current White House resident is the most dangerous president in his lifetime.
Witcover is not often deeply reflective—not until the final chapter—and some passages have a cut-and-paste character, but his intimate accounts of American politics over the past 50 years are always engaging, ever intelligent.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8018-8247-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
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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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BOOK TO SCREEN
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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