A fine effort to restore those names to the textbooks, and a lively, highly readable work of history.
A smart mix of family and social history by the son of a New Deal brains-truster.
Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, writes journalist Janeway (Columbia Univ.; Republic of Denial, not reviewed), was a carefully planned assault on “an arrogant, errant, shattered American capitalist system,” one that forced significant reforms on an unwilling subject. The architects of that far-ranging series of federal programs, anathema to the political right, admittedly represented, as Janeway’s father Eliot put it, a “cross-pollination of one or another kind of self-styled Communists and New Dealers,” but those New Dealers were not necessarily leftists; “most were Democrats,” Michael Janeway remarks, “but important characters in the story like [Harold] Ickes, [Henry] Wallace, and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York came from the Progressive Republican ranks,” the political heirs of FDR’s cousin Theodore, and others were prominent in law and finance, so that, “unlike typical ivory tower reformers, they knew firsthand the structures they set about reforming.” A number of the so-called brains-trusters, many young and without formal pedigree, advised FDR through an alphabet soup’s worth of acronymic agencies and directorates and held more or less direct power during the president’s four terms; many also went on to hold posts in succeeding administrations, notably that of Lyndon Johnson, whose early career owed much to them. (Readers daunted by the prospect of wading through Robert Caro’s definitive life of LBJ will learn much about that facet here, and what they learn ought to inspire them to go to Caro and discover more.) But for all their influence, a lot of these New Deal lieutenants have been lost to time, thanks in some measure to the ascendancy of a political reaction that has done much to tear “the New Deal, its lessons, its net effects, revisions of it, expansions from its base in subsequent decades” from public memory.
A fine effort to restore those names to the textbooks, and a lively, highly readable work of history.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-231-13108-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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
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