A difficult, unsettling and ultimately disappointing critique of the American worldview.
“[E]xceptionalism is a national impediment America can no longer afford,” declares journalist Smith (Somebody Else’s Century: East and West in a Post–Western World, 2010, etc.) in this challenge to Americans' view of themselves.
By exceptionalism, the author means the notion that America is a nation with a destiny, a view that "holds people out of history, in the space of timeless mythologies, where there are no choices or decisions." In four conceptually challenging essays, Smith contends that America stood outside of history until 9/11, understanding its past and conducting its policies by reference to myth and story rather than to "what is.” The events of 9/11 comprised such a crushing defeat of America’s “fundamentalist idea of itself” that we should take the opportunity it presented to abandon our dominant myths in favor of a vision of America as just another nation among many. Smith’s controversial and thought-provoking concepts, as elaborated from the arrival of Europeans in the New World through the first half of the "American Century," may indeed explain a great deal about the American character. For the period after 1945, however, the author contents himself with recounting the comfortable mythology of the left, with reflexive bashing of cardboard versions of Reagan, Bush and the tea party and praise for Jimmy Carter, who appears here as a foreign policy visionary. He ends with a call for America to “advance from a belief in destiny to a commitment to purpose,” which apparently entails adopting a "culture of defeat," more central planning, the subordination of the individual to society and an Orwellian "new vocabulary…the language must be cleansed." Smith's argument is further marred by sweeping and unsupported pronouncements of dubious validity and by a tone of condescension toward Americans collectively and individually that makes one bristle even at valid criticism.
A difficult, unsettling and ultimately disappointing critique of the American worldview.Pub Date: May 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-300-17656-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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