Great history of a dismal period.
A vivid look at a pivotal year at the beginning of the Cold War.
Most readers are familiar with the circumstances surrounding Harry Truman’s spectacular election upset in 1948. Fewer recall that this momentous event was followed by four disheartening years. Bunker, the winner of the George Washington Book Prize for An Empire on the Edge, delivers a sympathetic portrait but emphasizes that Franklin Roosevelt was a hard act to follow. The author begins on Labor Day 1949. The day before, Paul Robeson, brilliant baritone and “hero of the far left,” performed for an audience of 15,000 until a mob broke it up, hurling rocks and overturning cars. The day after, a World War II veteran killed 13 people in Camden, New Jersey. Alternating between international and domestic affairs, Bunker constructs a convincing argument that 1950 was a disaster. It began as America was reeling from news that Russia had the atom bomb and that Mao’s communists had conquered China, thus making the world’s most populous nation (in the minds of many) another Soviet satellite. Six months later, North Korea invaded the South. Domestic affairs verged on the grotesque. Even before the “volatile, intemperate, and unpopular” Joseph McCarthy exploded into the headlines, it was widely accepted in the popular mind that clever communists had burrowed deep into government and schools, stealing secrets and corrupting our children. Maddened by 20 years out of power, Republicans focused narrowly on winning it back by opposing every Truman policy without exception. He desegregated the armed forces on his own authority, but Congress would not pass a broader civil rights program. “Most Republicans supported civil rights reform; but if it came to a choice between that and weakening the president, their leadership would opt for the latter,” writes Bunker. Despite his admiration, the author, a diligent, evenhanded writer, notes that Truman lost his political prowess after 1948, and he and his party failed to pass the reforms of his vaunted “Fair Deal.”
Great history of a dismal period.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781541675544
Page Count: 496
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present.
The noted historian and New Yorker staffer looks into a future ruled by machines.
Thirty-odd years ago, writes Lepore, liberal democracies of old were being transformed into both authoritarian or autocratic regimes and by “automatocracy, rule by automation, government by machine-driven computation, prediction, and persuasion.” In this pointed rejoinder to Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which foresaw a world in which humans were essentially superfluous, Lepore charts a long history that extends deep into the “machine age,” beginning in the 17th century, which saw “the artificial as existing not only outside the natural but above it, an improvement upon it.” In this conception, humans were fallible, while machines faithfully and unfailingly obeyed the rules set for them. A logical progression followed in the 1920s with the rise of the Technocracy movement, a variety of fascism widely accepted in the U.S. that held that far from being free and equal, humans should be governed by scientists and engineers who alone “have the intelligence and education to understand the industrial operations that lie at the heart of twentieth-century life.” It’s a short hop from there to the present, with tech billionaires pushing AI and, in the case of the influential “self-described ‘neo-monarchist’” Curtis Yarvin, a dictatorship aided by it. In all this, Lepore writes, it is not just the human animal that suffers but all animals and all habitats, which can only worsen with the incessant demands for energy, rare earths, and water that AI requires. And what “humans crave, in that artificial world, is nature,” a nature that is increasingly silenced. This undemocratic world, benefiting only the wealthy at the expense of all else, is a prison of screens and keyboards from which, she writes memorably, “What is required is to imagine an escape, and then to conduct it.”
A deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9781324098423
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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