Right-slanted, monotonous historical reading offering little new, valid insight.
Schweikart (History/Univ. of Dayton) and Dougherty follow up the first volume of their Patriot's History of the Modern World (2012) with a disappointing sequel, again stressing above all the unchallenged nature of American exceptionalism.
The authors differentiate themselves from more traditional historians, who locate the American exception in the written Constitution, citizens' self-government and the separation of powers. Instead, they adopt a pre-Constitutional frame focusing on “the four pillars of American exceptionalism.” These include “common law, a Christian (mostly Protestant) religious culture, access to private property...and free market capitalism,” and Schweikart and Dougherty boldly assert that without all four pillars, “no true American style republic could be developed.” Many historians would find the authors’ thesis unsupportable, and this volume is disappointing mainly since it fails to elaborate how the “four pillars” have played out across the history of the world since 1945. The authors fail to pursue the opportunities to link historical developments to their primary thesis. Chief among these missed opportunities regards Martin Luther King's leadership of the civil rights movement. Schweikart and Dougherty present King as “an Atlanta-born Republican pastor who had a divinity degree from Boston University,” but they do not examine how a movement of mainly Protestant Christians, drawing from the nonviolent principles of Mahatma Gandhi, might affect the Protestant cultural requirement of their frame. Equally, they miss the references to King's movement that were so common among Lutheran-influenced protesters in East German nonviolent demonstrations in the late 1980s, and they ignore the impact of U.S. constitutional thinking in post–World War II settlements in Germany and Japan. The authors provide an avalanche of facts, but the causes that could link to their underlying “four pillars” thesis are neither offered nor proven. They conclude with a story from the Bible and compare it to the state of America in 2013, “which wants a government to ‘fight our battles’ and take care of everyone, needy or not.”
Right-slanted, monotonous historical reading offering little new, valid insight.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59523-104-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Sentinel
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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 Yorker staff 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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