Agreeably informative.
Life upstairs and downstairs at the White House vividly evoked by a presidential daughter.
With more vignette and anecdote than analysis, mystery-writer Truman (Murder at Ford’s Theatre, 2002, etc.) describes the men and women who have lived and worked in the “people’s house,” as well as the residence itself. She addresses subjects as diverse as presidential bets and children; First Ladies; the men and women behind the scenes who keep the place running, from chefs and housekeepers to ushers and calligraphers; the inhabitants’ often rocky relations with the media. As she recalls First Families from John and Abigail Adams (the initial residents in 1800) to the current occupants, Truman also details structural alterations that have occurred over the years. Though the building was considered large for its time, she notes, the original 36 rooms have increased to 132, while vegetable gardens and conservatories have been replaced by lawn and rose gardens. Until 1929 every president opened the White House to the people on New Year’s Day, the author tells us in a section on entertaining. Jefferson was an indifferent if quixotic host (he wore slippers to one formal dinner), but Dolly Madison was superb. Truman also details changes in staffing over the years, including the addition of gourmet chefs and office help for the First Lady, increased numbers of security personnel (more than 250 mentally disturbed visitors try to gain access each year), and the evolution of chief of staff into a powerful position. Her own recollections and impressions are mostly warm and appreciative, but a few about her father’s predecessors, the Roosevelts, are more tart. Eleanor, she notes, integrated the household staff at the White House, but when the family traveled to Hyde Park on weekends, the black White House servants had to eat separately. Her father, Truman is proud to report, ended segregation both in the army and in the presidential household.
Agreeably informative.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-44452-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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