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 Yorker staff 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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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