For students of American history, a thesis worth exploring.
The more things change, the more they stay the same—unless they change, which sometimes happens. Consider Republicans, for instance . . .
Americans, even the nonexceptionalists, tend to think that their nation is a young thing. “But the reality of our public life is very different,” writes emeritus professor Keller (History/Brandeis Univ.) “Our Constitution, only occasionally amended, is getting on to a quarter of a millennium. Our political parties are among the most venerable anywhere.” In the spirit of more fluent work by Kevin Phillips (The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America) and David Hackett Fischer (Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America), Keller offers a long-view approach of that quarter-millennium span, asserting that American history falls into three broad periods: the “deferential and republican,” marked by both a “mix of radical thought and moderate-to-conservative action” and a sense that the European way of doing things was likely best; the “party and democratic,” running from the 1830s to the 1930s, in which an America-first mentality collided with international realities and the growth of the big state; and the “bureaucratic and populist,” in which that big state came into its own even as conservatives denounced it. Keller’s parsing needs some fine-tuning, but the idea that history works in broad patterns is instructive. So too is his observation that once one cycle has been run, the next is likely to be very different. Thus, for instance, “today the GOP stands in opposition to most of what defined it from the 1850s to the 1930s,” more international than isolationist but also whiter and poorer. Even so, Keller observes, the old tropes are likely to last a while longer, so that the Iraq mess will likely further cleave the two parties into “war” and “peace” camps even as the electorate hold to a long-standing general ratio of more or less equal division into Democrats, Republicans and the nonaffiliated.
For students of American history, a thesis worth exploring.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-19-532502-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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.
