A scrupulously even-handed presentation based on impressive scholarship.
An acclaimed scholar brilliantly tracks the fight over the Constitution’s ratification: Was the proposed new government a confirmation or a betrayal of the American Revolution?
After meeting throughout the stifling of 1787 summer for the express purpose of recommending changes to the Articles of Confederation, delegates emerged from their secret deliberations in Philadelphia with a startling new proposal for a more energetic federal government. To take effect, the Constitution would require approval from at least nine of the 13 states. The ensuing national debate revisited virtually all the contentious issues that had roiled the Constitutional Convention, only this time the arguments were public and even more politically charged. Today, our reverence for the Constitution obscures the passionate battle over its approval by 18th-century Americans. Relying heavily on the massive documentary record of the ratifying conventions compiled by the Wisconsin Historical Society, Maier (American History/MIT; American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, 1998, etc.) revives those intense emotions, demonstrating how the arguments were shaped by each state’s peculiar history and by the leading participants in the debate. The author also shows how the outcome in each state—with particular attention paid to the crucial conventions in Massachusetts, Virginia and New York—affected the terms of the argument as the process unfolded. Notwithstanding eventual unanimity, the debate was close-run, despite the many advantages held by Federalist supporters. They controlled the majority of newspapers and dominated the professional and commercial classes most desirous of a strong national authority, and they often resorted to steamrolling opponents, obscuring nuanced objections to the Constitution and painting adversaries—these “Antifederalists,” a term to which Maier objects—as dangerous anarchists. Most of all, the Federalists had the imprimatur of George Washington, the new nation’s most unifying figure. The author orders her wide-ranging, complex narrative by frequently checking in with Washington, charting the progress of the ratifying conventions through the missives and messengers to and from Mount Vernon.
A scrupulously even-handed presentation based on impressive scholarship.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-684-86854-7
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
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
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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