Brief but scholarly in all the right ways—and excruciatingly timely.
In his debut book, professional archivist and Richard Nixon scholar Koncewicz mines vast research material to illuminate Nixon’s tenure from a fresh angle: his determination to violate laws for political advantage and the appointees who refused to obey.
At times, the author draws convincing, explicit comparisons to the Trump presidency. His first case study focuses on Nixon’s plan to use the Internal Revenue Service to illegally audit the tax filings of political enemies and then harass those enemies with findings from the audits. IRS commissioner Johnnie Walters, appointed by Nixon, refused to cooperate. Koncewicz additionally explains how Walters’ direct supervisor, Treasury secretary George Shultz, a key member of Nixon’s Cabinet, shielded the IRS from the president. Both Walters and Shultz knew they would be facing Nixon’s wrath and that they might be fired. But neither man wavered, and the author considers them courageous. Next, Koncewicz focuses on Nixon’s order to his freshly created Office of Management and Budget to illegally halt federal subsidies to elite universities. (For most of the chapter, the author narrows the focus to MIT.) Three assistant directors within the OMB—Kenneth Dam, William Morrill, and Paul O’Neill—banded together to resist Nixon’s order, and the author skillfully relates their saga. In the final chapters, Koncewicz highlights the best known of the resisters within the Nixon administration: Elliot Richardson, a highly visible appointee who played roles in the State Department, the Defense Department, and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare before agreeing to serve as Nixon’s attorney general. When Nixon’s self-created Watergate scandal led to the appointment of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, a showdown seemed inevitable. When Nixon tried to halt the Watergate investigation via Cox’s firing, Richardson refused to dismiss Cox, and that stand led to what has become known as the Saturday Night Massacre.
Brief but scholarly in all the right ways—and excruciatingly timely.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-520-29905-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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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