Next book

ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN AMERICAN LIFE

Thanks to Columbia University's Richard Hofstadter we have at last a fresh, forceful, fluent look from "the nether end" at various aspects of anti-intellectualism in America, past and present, and although it is self-styled a fragmentary rather than a formal study, the work is far-ranging, artfully approached and filled with a spirited, sensibility, without pedantry or polemic. It presents both the historical and socio-psychological aspects of its theme, pinpointing the middle-and-low-brow responses via our go-getter economy, the common man's traditional resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind, and the cyclical ambivalence which seems always to have greeted the scholar or expert when venturing into a democratic culture. For although the Founding Fathers, were a worldly elite, starting with Jefferson, too-much-book-larnin' soon became a political black mark. The catalogue covers, among other things, the patrician "who can write" and Jackson "who can fight"; the uritan pieties of grass-roots evangelicalism; parochial prejudices and the old ioneer stock vs the mongrelized liberals; tough, tart Billy Sunday shouting "When the word of God says one thing and scholarship says another, scholarship can go to hell"; Darwinism, the Scopes trial and the revolt against modernity; the Gilded Age reformers dubbed "long haired men and short haired women"; the business man as ulture-hero and the anti-academician folklore of labor; mass education and utiliarian values with the resultant twin cults of alienation and conformity; the egg-head as scapegoat during McCarthyism; and finally the rapprochements between the intellectual and the public as reflected through the Progressive era, the New Deal and currently the Harvard crowd of the Kennedy administration.

Pub Date: May 20, 1963

ISBN: 0394703170

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1963

Categories:

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 22


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • National Book Award Finalist

Next book

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 22


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • National Book Award Finalist

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

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Close Quickview