by Richard Aldous ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 19, 2012
A historian charts the ups, downs, and in-betweens of a transatlantic partnership that defined an era.
The just-released biopic starring Meryl Streep is likely to spark renewed interest in the whip-smart, hectoring and humorless Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first woman prime minister. No small part of her legacy was the relationship with her philosophical, transatlantic counterpart, the big-picture, affable Ronald Reagan. Partners in helping to end the Cold War, Reagan and Thatcher were always careful publicly to paper over differences, to appear united, to demonstrate that the “Special Relationship” between Britain and America remained unshakeable. But during the eight years their tenures overlapped, there were frequent, occasionally sharp differences between these two different personalities who seemingly shared only two traits: deep conservative conviction and an absolute devotion to their nation’s interest as they understood it. Although Reagan’s senior in service on the world stage, Thatcher was acutely conscious of her country’s inferior power position. Accordingly, she set out early to court the American president. Relying for color on declassified documents, interviews, oral histories and the published accounts of many observers, Aldous (British History and Literature/Bard Col.; The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli, 2007, etc.) revisits the two tangling over supplying technology for Soviet construction of the Siberian gas pipeline, over arms sales and control and over nuclear weapons and Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Reagan disappointed Thatcher by his less-than-full-throated support for her Falklands war; she responded with lukewarm enthusiasm for his Grenada invasion. They disagreed over policy in Lebanon and Libya, and they clashed over how best to deal with Gorbachev. Throughout, Aldous carefully and persuasively demonstrates the elaborate care each took to “handle” the other, precautions unnecessary had the relationship been as close as publicly portrayed.
A revealing look at the political marriage of two titans, who, like Roosevelt and Churchill, will be forever linked in history.
Pub Date: March 19, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-06900-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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