A rarely told story: how the GI Bill loosed great unseen forces that helped to transform America from the working-class, largely agricultural society of the Great Depression and the New Deal into a largely middle-class society. Bennett, a former reporter for the Boston Herald and the Detroit News, begins by tracing the origins of the bill and the fight to make it law in 1944. The American Legion was particularly influential: Members who had fought in WW I remembered the shabby treatment they had received when they came home. The heart of the book, though, is Bennett's study of the ways in which the law helped transform postwar American life. It provided opportunities for education unavailable to previous generations, as well as low- priced home mortgages that helped fuel new suburbs and emptied ethnic ghettos. Mature, world-traveled GIs, most of them from the urban and rural working class, stormed college campuses in record numbers, filled honor rolls and deans' lists, raised student performance levels, and shook up the old, gentlemanly college culture. Millions of erstwhile blue-collar, rent-paying workers turned into professionals of every calling, as well as prosperous, skilled entrepreneurs and home-owners. This silent army, Bennett suggests, created a revolution in American life; GIs used the money they got to do vital if seemingly ordinary things and in the process created a more abundant and egalitarian society. The total postwar cost of $14.5 billion was an investment that returned manyfold more in revenue as veterans earned more and paid more taxes. Bennett believes that the GI Bill was the most successful government program since the Homestead Act. A refreshing look at a time of optimism, sacrifice, hard work, and achievement (despite the Cold War) when the American dream finally became a reality for millions.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-57488-041-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1996
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
