The author mostly gathers material from other historians, and his tendency to explain a president’s choice as a consequence...
Looking at the “extraordinary relationships” between a handful of presidents and their most trusted advisers.
Presidents have Cabinets, secretaries, and aides, but this is often not enough counsel. Most have depended heavily on a single individual who may or may not occupy an official position within the government. In his first book, Cummings, a former senior adviser to Congress, delivers breezy dual biographies of presidents and these critical figures. “ ‘Right-hand men’ are chosen because their strengths and temperaments serve the purposes of the president,” writes the author. “Though most of them choose to wield their influence out of the spotlight, even from the shadows they impact our lives in deep and lasting ways.” Although Cummings mentions a dozen others at length, nine chapters emphasize perhaps the most significant. Two historical icons—Alexander Hamilton under Washington and William Seward under Lincoln—were Cabinet members. Two obscure figures (although not at the time)—Edward House under Woodrow Wilson and Louis Howe under Franklin Roosevelt—occupied shadowy, semi-official positions. More recent presidents have depended heavily on a chief of staff, a position heralded by Clark Clifford with Harry Truman and solidified by chiefs advising Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. There were also a first lady, Hillary Clinton, and a vice president: Dick Cheney under George W. Bush. Not shy with opinions, Cummings disapproves of Hillary Clinton’s performance but gives Cheney good marks and concludes with an energetic promotion of the vice presidency as the most effective office for a president’s right-hand man.
The author mostly gathers material from other historians, and his tendency to explain a president’s choice as a consequence of parallel childhood trauma may remind readers of the Freudian psychobiographies that flourished in the mid-20th century. On the plus side, he writes well and delivers entertaining accounts that illuminate an important feature of American presidential politics.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63388-315-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
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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