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BOATS AGAINST THE CURRENT

REVOLUTION AND MODERNITY, 1820-1860

A woolly, meandering analysis of commercial, rootless America in the Age of Jackson. Perry (History/Vanderbilt University) has homed in on narrower, more easily defined turf here than in his Intellectual Life in America (1984)—but hasn't produced a vigorously argued work. In tracing ``the origin of enduring tensions in what Americans hoped and believed about themselves and their society,'' he endeavors to show that our era's sense of change and loss is nothing new: For many Americans in the postrevolutionary period dominated by Andrew Jackson in politics and Ralph Waldo Emerson in literature, the past had become another country. But Perry records impressions of seismic shock unleashed by the entrepreneurial, ever-transforming nation, and doesn't record the change itself. Overhanging his account, and never answered satisfactorily, are several questions: Since American society from its beginnings was in constant ferment, what made the Jacksonian era so different? Exactly which conditions left observers so stunned at the rapidity of change? And why has Perry limited his analysis to foreign visitors (e.g., Alexis de Tocqueville and Frederika Bremer) and mostly northeastern intellectuals (Olmsted, Emerson, Thoreau, and abolitionist Theodore Parker)? There are a number of fascinating observations here—for instance, on the populist Jackson's desire to be considered a gentleman; on Tocqueville's brilliance of argument but lack of specificity about what he saw; and on the transient culture of peddlers, showmen, preachers, and gamblers. But Perry fails both to weave these points into a coherent framework and to draw compelling portraits of what Emerson might have called ``representative men'' of this turbulent time. During the 40-year period depicted here, the US declared its cultural independence from Britain and became a strapping giant of a nation that nearly destroyed itself over slavery. But one would never understand the sources of these creative and destructive tensions from Perry's history, presented without flair or logical unity.

Pub Date: April 1, 1993

ISBN: 0-19-506091-1

Page Count: 300

Publisher: Oxford Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1993

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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