A look at the turns JFK's legacy has taken since his death, and at how his and brother Robert's ghosts have haunted both Republican and Democratic successors. Henggeler (History/Univ. of Texas, Pan American) expands here on his first book, In His Steps (1991), a study of the Kennedy mystique's effect on LBJ. Despite a mixed record as congressman and president, JFK soon came to signify an idealistic promise his successors couldn't hope to match, the author contends. His legacy has been pernicious, derailing three presidents and influencing every presidential campaign since Kennedy's death. Johnson suffered most—overshadowed despite his brilliant legislative accomplishments, vainly trying to appropriate the Kennedy energy and media adulation, eventually brought down by a military entanglement that his predecessor initiated. The presidents and presidential and vice-presidential aspirants who followed have genuflected before the Kennedy image while using the assassinated president for their own ends, but they've often misfired. Hengeller's account leaves us with comic, jarring images: a homely Johnson posing for GQ at his Texas ranch; a staged photo op with Nixon running on the beach—in hard shoes—while reporters mock him; Clinton's JFK handshake replayed, backwards and in slow motion, to enhance its effect on voters. We get hopefuls like Gary Hart being overly Kennedy-esque; Dan Quayle comparing himself to JFK, to the derision of Lloyd Bentsen; and an all-too-human Ted out-Kennedy-ed by the more virtuous Jimmy Carter in 1979. Reservations: Hengeller's lack of respect for Hart and Michael Dukakis is poorly concealed; he runs hot, then cold on Clinton, hedging his bets; and he never satisfactorily identifies the reasons for the role Kennedy plays in public memory. Nonetheless, this meticulous and well-rendered treatise draws history onto important ground—tracking the influence of a single, powerful symbol in an age when political power came to reside increasingly in media spectacle.
Pub Date: April 14, 1995
ISBN: 1-56663-078-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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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