by Lawrence W. Levine & Cornelia R. Levine ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 13, 2002
Consistently interesting, the Levines’ gathering of letters will be useful to any student of 20th-century American history.
An illuminating collection in which Americans talk back after listening to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famed fireside chats.
“Tell me your troubles,” FDR invited after his first chat on March 4, 1933, and so the nation did, flooding Washington with millions of letters—most of which, note historian Lawrence Levine (The Opening of the American Mind, 1996) and independent scholar Cornelia Levine, were read, many of which were responded to, and all of which were carefully stored away in the White House archives. Wading through this sea of correspondence was surely a daunting task, but the Levines have exercised fine judgment in selecting the hundreds of texts that make up these pages, using them, often inventive language and all, to shed light on historical events now buried away in textbooks. Following a succession of bank failures that plagued the early days of his first term, for instance, Roosevelt urged his listeners to give the shored-up system their confidence: “I can assure you, my friends, that it is safer to keep your money in a reopened bank than it is to keep it under the mattress.” His listeners responded, in turn, with sentiments such as, “bankers who have betrayed trusts imposed in them shall be brought to trial and punished,” or, “I felt heartily ashamed that I did not vote for you last November and I sincerely hope your acts will be successful in relieving our country of at least some of it’s present depressing influences so that I will feel even more ashamed of myself.” The letters were not always so positive, and many that the Levines reproduce take Roosevelt to task over such matters as allying the US with England against Germany (“Yanks are not coming we will not die for Wall Street,” one telegram reads), advocating peacetime military conscription, and failing to act on Jim Crow discrimination laws. Almost all are respectful, however—even the few certifiably loony ones.
Consistently interesting, the Levines’ gathering of letters will be useful to any student of 20th-century American history.Pub Date: June 13, 2002
ISBN: 0-8070-5510-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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