Die-hard Crimson-ites may flock to this, but who else will want to read 400 pages of Harvard insider politics? It’s a fluid,...
Welcome to Harvard Yard—or, more precisely, to the president’s office in Mass Hall.
As Bradley (American Son, 2002, written as Richard Bow) tells it, Harvard found itself in something of an identity crisis at the turn of the new century. Was Harvard still the best school around, or was it being edged out by Princeton and Yale? The Harvard Corporation was worried, so when President Neil Rudenstine retired, it looked for someone who would shake things up a bit. They found their man in Larry Summers, the enfant terrible economist and former Treasury Secretary who became Harvard’s president in 2001. Here, Bradley covers everything from Summers’s responses to 9/11 and the rise of worldwide anti-Semitism to his attempts to crack down on grade inflation. Readers will even get a peek at his love life. But Bradley is most energized by the fracas around Harvard’s African-American Studies department. The best such department in the country, it was built up by President Rudenstine and Henry Louis Gates Jr., but when Summers came along, he immediately alienated Gates and didn’t even meet with him, a powerhouse by anyone’s standards, until he’d been seated as president for several months—and, when he did, he was wishy-washy about affirmative action. Then there was the showdown with Cornel West, which made the pages of the Boston Globe and the New York Times, after Summers told West his scholarship wasn’t up to snuff, that he needed to stop writing popular books and do some serious work. West was livid, eventually leaving Harvard for Princeton. Gates, too, toyed with switching, though for the time being he’s still in Cambridge. Bradley chronicles the West-Gates-Summers battle royal in detail that’s sometimes delicious and sometimes, well, mind-numbing.
Die-hard Crimson-ites may flock to this, but who else will want to read 400 pages of Harvard insider politics? It’s a fluid, solid profile but would have been better as a magazine article.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-056854-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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
© Copyright 2026 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.
