A thoughtful, good-natured critique of the left by one of its longstanding supporters. Tomasky, a columnist for New York magazine, seems to delight in the unreality of contemporary American politics—in, for instance, the fact that the Pentagon insists that even though the Cold War is over, the nation needs to be able to wage two major wars simultaneously, or in the way in which politicians of both parties agree that the poor need self-discipline and the wealthy need a tax break. That there is no organized leftist response to such claims, he continues, is the fault of the left itself; under Newt Gingrich the right has coopted the left's historical language of ``community and aspiration,'' while the left has been absorbed by infighting and self-righteousness. ``The left loves the idea of self-examination,'' he writes provocatively, ``but abhors its practice, because any serious self-examination will show that the left is considered broadly and laughably irrelevant by many people.'' Tomasky goes on to argue that while the left has always been negligible in number, its proponents can make a difference in national politics. That will not happen, he maintains, unless the left changes its ``tendency to find what's wrong with others' ideas rather than what may be right with them, to impute bad motives to their proponents, or to take a line of text or one plank in a proposal as proof that the writer has moved to the right or that the proposal is reactionary.'' Spurning a place at the table in rational discussions of illegal immigration or affirmative action can only increase the left's irrelevance, he says; instead, progressive causes need to recapture the Enlightenment belief in ``democracy and reason not as dead ends but as unfinished works that can and must be improved.'' A book that may speak to a small audience, but that speaks eloquently and sanely all the same.
Pub Date: June 10, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-82750-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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 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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