Lapsed Trump supporters might well open their minds to this attorney’s scholarly, entirely convincing proof of the damage...
The former special counsel to former President Bill Clinton takes on the 2016 election and James Comey’s effect on the outcome.
According to Davis (Close-Up: Twelve Months at Yale, 2017, etc.), the negative effect is indisputable, and he has the data, compiled both before and well after the election, to back up his claims. While he occasionally tumbles into legal jargon, he provides compelling criticism of the FBI, the New York Times, and others. The seed was sown on March 3, 2015, when the Times published a story about Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email account at the State Department. Davis shows how there was a precedent and that the account was legal and never hacked. It was eventually proven that none of the 55,000 emails were marked as classified; they were also never “missing.” The legislation requiring submission of records within 60 days of leaving office was amended after Clinton left the State Department, and 50,000 pages were submitted within one month of the change. The author next follows the statements and letters of Comey. The tumult over the March story died down until the Times published another story in late July claiming that two officials within the intelligence community recommended a “criminal referral” concerning Clinton’s handling of the emails; that story was based on a leak. The officials released a joint public statement contradicting the Times story, and the FBI quietly opened a criminal investigation. Comey’s statements about the investigation(s) were, in the words of a former prosecutor who worked for him, “an unprecedented public announcement by a non-prosecutor that there would be no prosecution.” Indeed, he violated several long-standing Department of Justice practices of never confirming or denying existence of an investigation and to do nothing in the 60 days prior to a presidential election. The author’s epilogue, “It’s Time for an Impeachment and Twenty-Fifth Amendment Investigation,” is surprisingly calming.
Lapsed Trump supporters might well open their minds to this attorney’s scholarly, entirely convincing proof of the damage done.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7772-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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