A nuanced, warts-and-all portrait that offers much to ponder in this election year and beyond.
An illuminating effort to explain America to the world—and to itself.
The notion of American exceptionalism—the idea that America is different from the rest of the world—has long been a shibboleth among historians and a magnet for yahoos and jingoes. Editors Schuck (Law/Yale Univ.; Diversity in America: Keeping Government at a Safe Distance, 2003, etc.) and Wilson (Public Policy/Pepperdine Univ.; Thinking About Crime, 1975, etc.) restore it with the wise observation that America is at least unusual in its ability to be “deeply divided, witlessly vulgar, religiously orthodox, militarily aggressive, economically savage, and ungenerous to those in need, while maintaining a political stability, a standard of living, and a love of country that is the envy of the world—all at the same time.” The contributors examine the mechanisms, institutions and folkways that allow this curious condition. One is the tripartite division of federal power, especially the autonomous power of Congress, even with the efforts of the current administration to expand executive control. Another is the concurrent complexity of government and broad distribution of decision-making authority. Yet another is the unusual interplay of governmental and nongovernmental agencies to produce government goods and services, which accounts for the military-industrial complex so evident in Iraq today. The citizenry, for its part, expects little from the government by way of economic security, which is in contrast with Europeans, who demand that government assure a decent standard of living. The contributors turn up some surprises and offer some pointed notes on current controversies. For one, the military is far from scraping the bottom of the barrel, though that is a common perception. “It still recruits its enlisted personnel overwhelmingly from high school graduates of middling to high intelligence scores on the standard tests and recruits its officer corps from college graduates,” writes Johns Hopkins professor Eliot Cohen. And, notes Schuck in an essay on the subject, “recurrent political efforts to limit immigration almost invariably fail,” for all the rhetoric surrounding the matter.
A nuanced, warts-and-all portrait that offers much to ponder in this election year and beyond.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-58648-561-0
Page Count: 720
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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 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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
