Sharply focused introduction to an election that fundamentally changed the landscape of American politics.
Historian Parsons (John Quincy Adams, 1998, etc.) examines a watershed in American campaign history.
The 1828 presidential election pitted frontiersman and war hero Andrew Jackson against incumbent John Quincy Adams, a highly educated aristocrat, accomplished politician and the son of a previous president. The word “campaign” is a military term, Parsons points out, and this particular one was more like an all-out war. It introduced many innovations that persist to this day in American politics, including coordinated media efforts, get-out-the-vote campaigns and other touchstones of organized political party strategy. Most notably, the campaign showcased the use of smear tactics. The notorious “Coffin Handbills,” distributed by Adams advocates, branded Jackson’s wife an adulteress—her divorce, unknown to her, was legally shaky—and attacked the candidate for executing military deserters and for his brutal military actions against Native American villages. Meanwhile, Jackson partisans charged Adams with procuring a young woman for Russian Czar Alexander I while in the foreign diplomatic service. Ironically, Parsons reveals that Jackson and Adams had previously worked in common cause for shared political goals and expressed genuine mutual admiration and respect. Though the campaign highlighted their differences, the two men actually had much in common. In particular, both intensely disliked organized electioneering by their political parties. After the 1828 election, however, the party polarization they loathed emerged triumphant—and effectively persists today.
Sharply focused introduction to an election that fundamentally changed the landscape of American politics.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-19-531287-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
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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