An intelligent, thorough synthesis of how the rights and responsibilities of American citizenship have evolved from colonial times to the present. Schudson (Sociology/Univ.. Of Calif., San Diego) sets out first to disabuse the reader of any notions that Americans have always been expected to be informed about politics or even to care. In the 18th century, only a few propertied white males (—freeholders—) could even vote, and elections were more of a social carnival than a political arena. By the Jacksonian era, however, the —common person— had begun to assert the privileges that we have come to regard as rights. Education was more widely available, the explosion of the print media made information available to the newly literate public, and ordinary folks began enacting social change through reform associations. By the late 19th century, machine politics, though corrupt, had created the most personalized electoral system America has ever known. Voter turnout was at its highest in these years, as people eagerly debated issues and saw their friends appointed to government posts. The interwar era saw a disillusionment with democratic citizenship, but the postwar baby boomers —widened the web of citizenship— by again agitating for rights, especially for people who had been previously excluded from the political process. Schudson says that this —rights-regarding— model of citizenship is still the paradigm for contemporary political life. Overall, this is a well-written, general political history, peppered with some fresh sociological insights and useful demographics. But for a book that purports to be about the ordinary person, the research is a bit impersonal: although this is not a direct history of the media in the ways his previous books were (Discovering the News, 1978; Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion, 1984), Schudson overwhelmingly favors newspapers for his primary source material, eschewing more intimate records such as journals and letters. Sometimes overly ambitious, but its grand scale also makes Schudson’s work a valuable introductory text in American politics.
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-82729-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
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
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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