This book provides much to study and reread. Though mostly well-written, the narrative is factually dense, intense, and...
A deep, scholarly dive into the New Deal and how it relates to the world’s attempts to deal with what he calls the “Great Slump.”
The Depression was not entirely caused by the stock market crash. In great, sometimes overwhelming detail, Patel (European and Global History/Maastricht Univ.; Soldiers of Labor: Labor Service in Nazi Germany and New Deal America, 1933 to 1945, 2005, etc.) shows how the destabilizing effects of World War I caused the collapse of states and empires and how the reparations required by the Treaty of Versailles left an insurmountable burden on Germany. Franklin Roosevelt proposed an easing of those payments to European countries but did not offer to ease the debt they owed to the United States, which they couldn’t pay without the reparations. As such, nearly everyone defaulted. Europe and the world were slipping, economic chaos spurred coups, and dictatorships were replacing democracies. The author notes that democracy was considered boring, while fascism and communism were considered more innovative. It was time for the U.S. to take the global economic and political lead, but the nation wasn’t yet ready. Instead, it turned inward, cut lending, raised tariffs, and fixed prices. The New Deal was not only an alphabet soup of institutions, it was an amalgam of ideas culled from all over the world, in places where pensions and unemployment insurance were already established. At the time, Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini were admired for their successes in creating labor services, education, and housing. Many New Deal plans had distinct similarities to their programs, which unfortunately included racism, expansionism, and control of their inhabitants. The author shows how all nations turned to nationalism, social engineering of planned communities, intervention, and insulation to seek security and recovery.
This book provides much to study and reread. Though mostly well-written, the narrative is factually dense, intense, and often verbose. It should be useful to economists, researchers, and specialists in the Depression and its aftermath.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-691-14912-7
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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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