A highly opinionated yet accessible work of history and current affairs.
Returning to the Enlightenment ideals of Founding Fathers like James Madison to understand the stakes in the current illiberal political climate.
O’Leary—a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Democracy at University of California, Irvine, and former reporter for the Los Angeles Times and TIME—has been an observer of the political scene for three decades, and he cares deeply about the recent drift toward “reactionary” politics in the U.S. Noting that “for two centuries, [America] has been the modern Athens for those seeking a society that values democracy, equality, and freedom,” he is appalled by the Trump administration’s seeming determination to “reject that legacy, preferring instead the ancient authoritarian principles of privilege, hierarchy, inequality, and exclusion that divides societies into winners and losers based on ethnic identity, gender, social status, and economic power.” As other historians have documented, O’Leary points out the moment when classic conservative principles turned reactionary: the ugly 1964 compromise between Barry Goldwater and the white supremacist South, represented by segregationist George Wallace. To tell the unsettling story of the nation’s continued drift into Trumpism and its many attendant ills, O’Leary plunges back into the historical record, showing the strenuous adherence to individual autonomy that the Enlightenment authors espoused despite the illiberality of their own era. The author cogently breaks down the writings of Locke, Paine, and others, showing the terrible compromises the early founders had to make in securing constitutional ratification by the slave states. Moving into the recent past and present, O’Leary cleanly melds historical research with his own personal outrage. “Donald Trump stands as the embodiment of reactionary America,” he writes. “He is both a hard-right capitalist and a man who believes that his whiteness and his maleness give him the right to hold others who are neither in contempt.”
A highly opinionated yet accessible work of history and current affairs. (16 pages of color photos)Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64313-434-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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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