An ambitious but shrill gathering of political jeremiads.
A debut collection of essays denounces the misadventures of American imperialism.
According to Palloor, relentless American expansion and colonialism since Woodrow Wilson’s presidency is rooted in the notion of Manifest Destiny, a religiously inspired sense of moral exceptionalism. But though the world since the fall of the Soviet Union has been dominated by the unparalleled power—and unchecked arrogance—of the United States, its inevitable decline is certain to radically alter the geopolitical landscape. The diminishment of American influence can be diagnosed both militarily and economically. The U.S.’s repeated failures to impose its hegemony around the world—it keeps starting and losing wars—have undermined its credibility. And the eventual collapse of the dollar as the world’s default currency, the depletion of capitalism as a viable economic model, and the rise of China as a financial juggernaut will doom the nation’s economic supremacy. Palloor assembles 18 essays, each one perfectly comprehensible on its own independent of the others. The political terrain covered is expansive: the Arab Spring, the colonizing of Africa for the sake of plundering its mineral wealth, the conflict between Israel and Palestine, and the significance of Che Guevara to the Arab world, just to name a small representative sampling. The common thread that unites them all is the concern with imperialistic tyranny and the damage it has wrought all over the world. The author’s devotion to social justice is admirable, and the entire book is infused with a heartening solidarity with the oppressed. But the prose is as breathlessly immoderate as many of Palloor’s prognostications—one chapter is entitled “American Imperialism: A Menace While Breathing Its Last!” In addition, the author’s strident confidence in his own judgments isn’t matched by the empirical rigor with which he defends them. For example, his view that the U.S. is only interested in countering Iranian power for selfishly economic reasons is declared more than it is argued. Furthermore, some of the essays go back as far as 2001 and are dated—it seems odd now to trumpet the success of Venezuelan socialism while the nation slides into abject poverty.
An ambitious but shrill gathering of political jeremiads.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4828-1391-3
Page Count: 122
Publisher: PartridgeIndia
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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