Aggrieved and angry, just the thing to read before the midterm elections.
A novelist turns to nonfiction to denounce America’s slide toward “the precipice of authoritarianism.”
Best known for legal thrillers, Patterson describes a series of “tripwires”—that is, “decisive moments, each avoidable, wherein myopia, miscalculation, or malignity alter the course of events.” Exhibit A: the 2000 Supreme Court decision that handed the presidency to George W. Bush “by judicial fiat.” That tripwire led to other disasters: the war in Iraq; an unprecedented tax break for the already rich, which accelerated a process of inequality that shattered the democratic promise of widely shared wealth in the post–World War II era; and the acceptance of massive deficits and debt as business as usual. He sees these missteps abroad on the land today, as President Trump repeats the errors of his predecessor, from war with Iran to crony capitalism. Enabling him, Patterson writes, is the Roberts Supreme Court: “We have witnessed the GOP’s conversion of our presumptively independent judiciary into an avatar of that party’s political interests.” For each moment of willful decline, a previous step forward is negated, the author says: Trump “mining the vein of racism” has “helped America hate again,” while the Tea Party of old has been supersized into MAGA. It’s no surprise, Patterson notes, that the only ethnic group to support Trump consisted of whites and especially the easily manipulated uneducated and left-behind. Many of these recent developments were unleashed by a tripwire of then-FBI Director James Comey’s making when, on the eve of the 2016 election, he wrote to Congress to inform it that Hillary Clinton was under investigation in “a self-preening desire to establish his bipartisan piety.” By Patterson’s account, that act handed the White House to Trump, who has been busy taking a wrecking ball—figuratively and literally—to it ever since. Patterson closes by suggesting a set of remedies, from addressing disparities of race and class to reversing Trump’s tax cuts and “getting immigration right” by a Democratic commitment to meaningful border security.
Aggrieved and angry, just the thing to read before the midterm elections.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2026
ISBN: 9798893850901
Page Count: 256
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2026
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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