A little late to take advantage of this year’s festivities, but readers with an interest in presidential history will find...
White House fun-facts–compiler Boller (Presidential Anecdotes, not reviewed) provides an entertaining catalogue of material about a president’s happiest day.
Telling the story of inaugurations from Washington’s first to Clinton’s second (with a sentence or two on the swearing-in of George W.), the author spins a lively narrative full of intriguing tidbits on the evolution of the inaugural ceremony, which was born amid controversy. Wary revolutionaries contested any hint of regal pomp at Washington’s swearing-in, and the new president defied his deist comrades by adding the extra-constitutional words “So help me God” to the prescribed oath of office. The thematically organized narrative has chapters on everything from Inauguration Day weather to how the presidents-elect traveled to Washington (by steamboat and stagecoach in Andrew Jackson’s case; by bus in Bill Clinton’s). This approach leads to a certain amount of repetition, but not so much as to prove an obstacle. Boller gives learned commentary on now-forgotten political, religious, and social movements that found expression at the inaugural, particularly Sabbatarianism (which kept James Monroe, Zachary Taylor, Woodrow Wilson, and a few other presidents from taking office forthwith when Inauguration Day fell on a Sunday). He also shows that the fantastically expensive balls of recent years have long precedent. At Ulysses S. Grant’s swearing-in feast, for example, the menu included baked salmon, roast boar’s head, pickled oysters, lobster, turkey, capons stuffed with truffles, mutton, roast beef, ham, and dozens of other plates—enjoyment of which was substantially diminished by the fact that most of the food lay frozen on the groaning board, the night being extra-cold and central heating nonexistent.
A little late to take advantage of this year’s festivities, but readers with an interest in presidential history will find it worthwhile.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100546-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
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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