Although income inequality, overcrowded prisons, drought, and traffic continue to challenge California, Zacchino...
An informative history of troubles and triumphs in the Golden State.
Journalist and editor Zacchino (co-author: Boots on the Ground by Dusk: My Tribute to Pat Tillman, 2008), a Californian since she was 4 years old, has been reporting on the state since the late 1960s (including 31 years at the Los Angeles Times), when Jerry Brown, now governor, took his first elective office as a member of the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees. Since then, she has followed his “meteoric rise,” which included becoming secretary of state in 1970 and, four years later, California’s 34th governor, the youngest in more than 100 years. By the time he again took office as the 39th governor, in 2011, the most populous and ethnically diverse state in the country had evolved from being “the seductress of the Wild West” to a state facing severe economic, social, and political problems. “The financial meltdown had walloped” California, where the bursting housing bubble resulted in unprecedented foreclosures, and the recession brought high unemployment; state government, “collapsing under a crippling deficit, began issuing IOUs to pay its bills” and cut spending for education and health care. Under governors Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, California had drifted “stutteringly rightward,” endorsing deregulation and slashing environmental protections and social services. Some Californians looked to Texas as a model of the benefits of limited government, since that state enjoyed a boom during the recession, due to its oil industry. Zacchino, however, contrasts the two states to highlight California’s progress, notably under Brown’s second governorship, defined by liberal pragmatism and responsible policies. As Texas’ growth flagged with the drop in oil prices, California outperformed the rest of the country, while “raising taxes to pay for schools, investing in infrastructure,” and actively addressing climate change.
Although income inequality, overcrowded prisons, drought, and traffic continue to challenge California, Zacchino persuasively portrays the state as vibrant, farsighted, and civic minded.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-312-64935-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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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