A slice of history with an always relevant underlying subject: how a democratic government balances civil liberties against...
Lively account of the government’s heavy-handed response to the Red Menace.
In the unsettled wake of World War I, when fears of sabotage and espionage had already shaken the country, American communists instigated a series of protests, strikes, riots and bombings. Admirers of Warren Beatty’s film Reds, which told this story from the radicals’ point of view, will remember some of the major players: anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, journalist John Reed, Communist Party founder Louis Fraina. Lawyer/author Ackerman (Boss Tweed, 2005, etc.) recounts the maneuvers of various government officials on the opposite side. His fast-paced narrative opens with the 1919 firebombing of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s private residence, an event that spurred Palmer to create within the Justice Department’s fledgling Bureau of Investigation a Radical Division headed by 24-year-old J. Edgar Hoover. Using techniques developed as a cataloguer for the Library of Congress, Hoover created a vast index-card system identifying and linking troublemakers. Relying on this information, Palmer rounded up thousands of aliens and citizens, intending to deport the first and prosecute the second. The only “crime” of the vast majority caught up in this dragnet was their affiliation with unpopular political opinion. At first cheered by Congress and the public, the Palmer Raids gradually acquired a bad odor, thanks to abuses revealed by Clarence Darrow, Felix Frankfurter, Oliver Wendell Holmes and especially Labor Department assistant secretary Louis Post. His presidential hopes dashed, Palmer retired, but Hoover was just far enough down the food chain to disclaim any significant role in the civil-liberties abuses. He survived to be named director of what would become the FBI during the Coolidge administration. From that perch, this indefatigable record-keeper would bedevil nine more presidents, becoming the most feared and powerful bureaucrat in the federal government.
A slice of history with an always relevant underlying subject: how a democratic government balances civil liberties against the need for public safety.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-78671-775-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
